You could hardly see for all the snow, spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. When they started to wear out, we taped them with duct tape. Boy did they smell. And if you wore them without socks, your feet got black.
Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a uniform with hat and everything.
Oh yeah ...and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.
I recall a friend from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, just before he fell off little did his mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?
We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
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You know, SER, I have not found one single family that is 'functional!'
We survived, didn't we....
My parents are both in their mid-fifties and have miraculously turned out to be great people. But... my father grew up with abusive alcoholic parents who made the kids sleep on the kitchen floor and also made them get jobs at age 10 or 11 and hand over all the money they earned so that my grandparents could buy booze. My grandma would get up in the morning when the kids would get up and put them outside and lock them out of the house. This is before they were school age! They would have to find breakfast, lunch, and dinner for themselves. If they had to use the bathroom, they had to find a neighbor because my grandma wouldn't unlock the door until the sun went down. My mother was also from alcoholic parents. My grandmother would bang her head against the wall when she spilled her milk. My mother would have to call the police when my grandparents were beating each other up.
So, there were definitely disfunctional families back then. I don't know how my parents were able to turn into successful, loving, decent, fairly normal people. My mom was the most loving, affectionate, caring, non-abusive mother ever, and she told me that she learned that from watching Leave it to Beaver and deciding that when she grew up that was the kind of family she wanted to have. But, anyway, I'm 30years old now and I've grown up being told how horrible things were back then.
We were also daredevils as we rode our bikes without wearing helmits. I grew up on the southside and where Memorial Rd is now, it used to be a field. We would go down there and play on Monkey Island by the railroad tracks.
Every night we sat down and had dinner together. There was no picking up the plate and sitting in front of the tv. It was off during dinner.
And, we could go to bed at night in the summer with the doors open to help us cool off.
Different world then.
And we wrote our own essays, rather than cutting and pasting them wholesale from stuff that's been repeated a thousand times before on the Internets.
Holy crap, after reading this, I feel lucky to have survived. We had the "flu" more often than my kids ever did. I think much of that was due to poor food handling.
Each generation has their own complaints, but it is funny how when you look back, it always seems better than the generation before and the one afterward.
Beejay: That's a fact. I just think I got more than usual?
Mary: We COULDN'T get up from the table UNTIL we were excused. We also had to clean the mess up. Someone had to pick-up, Someone had to wash, and Someone had to dry and put the dishes away. EVERY NIGHT. MY GOD, how could our folks EVER have expected us to do these COMMY things?
And we wouldn't play with the smug egomaniac kids who were in love with themselves.
Yes, SER, be sure to reference and cross reference with proper APA format next time you post something... we wouldn't want you sued for plagarism, now would we Mark?
Der...
My daughter was permanently kicked out of gym a couple weeks ago for telling her gym teacher "bullshit" (long story, but I probably would have said the same thing 20 years ago..). I had to laugh: PERMANENTLY kicked out of gym?? I didn't realize gym teachers were such fragile little flowers these days. I would have paid big $$ to get kicked out of gym, who knew it was so easy:-)
Cyndi
If she had gone to Mitchell School all those years ago I can guarantee Miss Batikis would have kicked her butt.
Toad you are right. Someone cleared, someone washed and someone dried.
And once a week we had to clean our rooms.
cyndi, the whole point of the piece is that people of a certain age never needed all of the special help that the kids of today require.
Come on -- in light of that, it's pretty darned funny that the whole thing is lifted and copied over and over using modern technology!
As someone who watched Batman in color, I'm proud to say I composed this comment all by myself.
Falling off the monkey bars and breaking your arm wasn't a source of income for lawsuit happy ambulance chasers, but having a cast over the summer time put you on a near hero pedestal.
You would pull carrots or potatoes right out of the garden, wipe off the excess dirt on the pant leg of a filthy pair of bluejeans and enjoy a fresh sweet crunch as you bit into it.
And if you could get away with it, break the thermometer on purpose because the little globs of mercury were so neat to push around.
And yes, I did leave my teeth marks on window sills that were painted with paint containing lead.
And your point, Mark, was to be snarky about cutting and pasting... and my point is "who gives a crap". Many bloggers make a *living* cutting and pasting the thoughts of others to bring to light topics their readers may not have otherwise been exposed to, and I'm glad SER did exactly that. It was a fun read... if you wish to get something negative out of it, then bummer for you. I'm under 40 and think the world has gone absolutely freaking crazy, so glad to live in the county where old time common sense prevails;-) Yeee haaaa!
Cyndi, it is not difficult to cite where it came from (with a link) or, in a case of something like this, awknowledge it is not your original composition (the original author of this one is probably lost to history by now...almost like a folk tale).
As someone who has seen his stuff lifted wholesale on the net and passed off by someone else as their own, I can say it pisses me off! And yes, I have sent a take down notice or two in my day.
Hi Kids it’s me SER.
You know what would be neat as hell, when everyone meets at Beejay and yes, you Mark and Cyndi, I think the Bobster will be with the president that weekend so he cannot come, and Mary do you live close enough or do I have to have my jet come and pick you up, but we should have a “round table” and we can all speak our peace and call each other dinks and giggle our asses off. The only thing we cannot discuss is religion and politics.
OH, and drinking is required!!!
I will be watching derby girls wrestle big Mexican guys that night, a completely tacky, sexist, non PC experience (there might even be strippers there, but not sure if they get into the wrestling action, sadly...) so me and the librarian will have to make it another time;-)
Hey Cyndi,
Will that be on "Pay Per View"?
Do kids really require special help today, or are we unwittingly giving it to them when they really don't require it. If we try so hard to protect a child from falling, how are they going to learn to get up?
If we provide crisis counselors for every traumatic event, how will someone learn to reach within themselves to handle a crisis when they are on their own? If we attempt to give them a pill every time it hurts, how will they learn that pain is part of the course of healing? If we have made violence a main fabric for our entertainment, how do they learn that death is an event with no return?
If they have never seen Batman in black and white, how do they learn to appreciate the brilliance of seeing it in color?
And I wrote this myself.
I now step off the soapbox
SER
You will have to send a plane.
My table is oval...but you can have your discussion at it anyway. Given that, I do believe it will be an oval table discussion!
www.myspace.com/mondo_lucha
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS0b8slUKag
It's at Turner Hall in Milwaukee; should be quite a show! I can't say I'm a big fan of any of these events (other than roller derby), but collectively, it's a campy grouping of the most interesting people in a 100 mile radius (Blogger party included, but sadly absent;-)-- so I can't hardly miss it.
And here I was going to let you dig up...what was it you wanted from my yard...asparagus or rhubarb???
Ser, I know you are all right...I had a bunch of really hard-a** college profs who drilled it into me that you always give credit where its due or you will get bounced from college, do not pass Go, do not college college degree.
I know some people post stuff trying to pass it off as their own while others (and I think you may belong in this category, SER) post stuff thinking, there's no way anyone would believe I wrote this so I will just post it. Problem is, I have seen a lot of people at the old JT site who then proceed to praise the writing skills of the person posting it, so obviously people ARE that stupid!
So I guess what I am really asking is, help out the stupid people :)
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