An era come and gone...do u rememeber?

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 icepack 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.

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 hat and everything.

I thought that I was
supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of
myself.

I just can't recall how
bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270
digital TV cable stations.


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 Donny Reynolds
from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop,
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?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO
SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T -- SORRY FOR WHAT
YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING