Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)
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.
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 170 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 our 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!
(Thanks Kimmie for this!)
Today is a tough day. There have been some tough days lately. I have a pre-teen and that should explain everything. I love him to death.....but I think he HATES me.
And then there is my mom. The woman that gives me so much strength. She stands behind me in everything I do. She is happy with me and sad with me, and she always picks me up when I am down.
but now I need to do some picking up on her side. She is sick. She has Lymphoma. I think I'm still in a bit of denial about it. I shouldn't be. Because I hear her on the phone (she is so far away) and she tells me all about her treatment. It's killing me that I cannot be there. She had her first dose of chemo yesterday. Today, she told me she was cutting all her hair off as short as possible so she wouldn't see it all on her pillow. Her doctor told her that it could happen in as short as 6 days. I have spent most of the morning crying. I want her here. Or I want to be there. But really my brother and I want her HERE. I LOVE YOU MOM.
My yummy boyfriend.... I LOVE HIM TO DEATH! He gives me his shoulder to cry on all the time. He is so good to me.
In all my emotions today, I did manage to get some work done. Just a few dolls. Hop over HERE to see them. More are traced and sewed and clothes cut, so in a few days there will be a few more.
okay, off to pick up my lil one from school.
