Them Wuz The Days

My mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread

butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same

knife and no bleach or antibacterial wipes, but we

didn't seem to get food poisoning. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper or

in a baggie with a twist tie, in a brown paper bag, not in

ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.

ColiAlmost all of us would have rather gone swimming

in the lake or at the beach instead of a  pristine pool

(talk about boring), no beach closures then. We  all took gym class... and risked

permanent injury with a pair of regular old tennis shoes

from a department store if we were lucky, but likely hand me

downs instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with

air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as

much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but

they must have happened because they tell us how much safer

we are now. We got a spanking for doing something wrong,

parents called it discipline.  And we all grew up to

accept the rules and to honor and respect our parents,

grandparents teachers, police officers, and those older than

us. We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to

read and write, do math and spell almost all the words

needed to write a grammatically correct letter.  Even

in cursive! We all said prayers in school irrespective of our

religion, sang the national anthem and no one got

upset. Staying in detention after school caught all sorts

of negative attention we wish we hadn't  got. 

It was shameful, and detention was nothing compared to what

was waiting at home. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish

something before I was allowed to be proud of

myself. I just can't recall ever being bored, even

though we were without computers, Play Station,

Nintendo,  X-box, laptops, cell phones or 270 digital

TV cable stations. We weren't!  We went outside and

played with the neighbor kids of all ages, made up games,

and rode our bikes for miles without helmets.Oh yeah , and where were the antibiotics and

medical kit when I scraped something or got that bee sting?

I could have been killed! We played "King of the Hill" on piles of

gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt,

mom pulled out the bottle of iodine or red Mercurochrome and

then we got our backside spanked.  Now it's a trip

to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of

antibiotics and then mom and dad call the lawyer to sue the

contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel

where it was such a  threat. 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 never needed to get into group therapy and/or

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? LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU

MISSED. WOULDN'T TRADE  IT FOR

ANYTHING! Pass this to someone and  remember that

life's most simple pleasures are very often the 

best. Ah, those WERE the days!