Under Age 40 ? You won't understand.

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 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 th erapy 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 Pass this to
someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are
very often the best.