Do you Remember?

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, but I can't remember getting E-coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of in a pristine pool (talk about boring). 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. Every year, someone taught the whole school lesson by running the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system. Speaking of school, we all said the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged syches. I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles.

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. I thought that I was supposed to acomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

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 Iodine 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 (physical abuse) here too ... and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home. Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent. Summers were spent behind the push push lawnnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny 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 survive?

Not Original But it hits the spot!

I go through this every single day. Comparison and Contrast no longer works. The world has moved beyond that. I am playing catch-up every day.

interesting. i always liked listening to my parents tell my how they had it as kids. how they had to wait serveral minutes for a picture to appear on the tv, or when they got there first tv. and they had only one station, maybe two.

note:my parents are in there mid 50s so there time was way different

Woah

thats a lot of reading, but ALL too true...im only 22, but i hear bout all this stuff every day....came across this picture the other day of my mom sittin in front of their new 13" b&w tv.....i was like "nice remote control dad!" ..hehehehe

hmm, im only 18 and i remember all that.. infact, i remember fixing one of those push lawn mowers so i could make money by mowing my neighbors lawn... Snack money, milkshakes ruled on summer days.

anyone remember dirt clod fights? the mud would dry, making a hard dirt ball.. you would throw it at people and it would break.. i had a treefort with traps around it to keep people out (a hole with sticks and leafs piled over it.. people would fall in, to bad it was only about a foot deep.. they could twist an ankle!)

although, we did call it PE.. guess i grew up right before everything went pussified.. either thta, or i just lived in a hick town (which i did)

lol this reminds me of my childhood. the sad thing is, as a look back at my neighborhood, it is like rikki lake/jerry springer/jenny jones kind of stuff.

im only in my 30's and still i see how much the world has changed, and everything has become more than it should. who needs liquid bandaid, neosporin, and things like that?
i had many a run in with a rusty nail in my misadventures as a child and we just got disinfected w/ this bad smelling chemical and back out we went.

ugh now that i read this, it reminds me so much of how pathetic stuff is.


ahh good old dirt clod wars! we had many kids in our neighborhood and those were great!


ALSO!! none of the kids were so grossly obese when i was young. sure there were fat kids, but nothing like today. my nephew's best friend is 260 pounds and is only 13. i feel bad for the kid, but now that i think, we were always playing outside,
and we were poor so we had no money to buy junk food.

after school we would just buy 1 thing of fries to split among all of your friends.
now they are supersizing it !

also, children where i lived had much less parental attention than today. our parents sent us to school in the morn, and didnt care about our grades that much, and were happy as long as we came home before dinner/supper (depending on where you live)

man o man the changes

brandon

EDIT: also im surprised that out of the hundred or so (im not kidding, there were lots of kids in my neighborhood) only 2 are in prison and one is dead.

after shooting eachother with crossbows, chasing eachother with shovels, and playing chicken, we made it pretty good

Every bit of that is true. When you got new sneekers you had 2 choices, high or low top and black or white. I do miss the raw hamberger. I used to watch Star Trek on a black and white tv.

Don't forget eatin hunnysuckles off the backyard fence.

without cable i still only get 3 stations, and 2 of them are canadian.

Lol,

It seems as far as I look back that things were always better then, playing on the block with my friends, street hockey, forts, biking, camping. I can't remember worrying or stress or half the things that kids today are introduced to at such a young age. Drugs, Alcohol (Unfortunately I was brought up in a neighborhood that these things are now as common as dirt, I was only in grade 7 the first time I was introduced to these things!) You think society has changed now, wait 10 years and see how bad it gets the severity of our laziness, greed and gluttony I swear grows exponentially over time.
But hay look on the (not so) bright side of things. We could be at war tomorrow and go up in one big puff of radioactive smoke. and none of us would have to reminess on the times that were better than now. because there wouldn't be a now.

stupidity is exponential, kind of makes you think why we are here.

I wonder.

Dam , sad thread ;hehe, I remember those console tv'slol, 2 large men or 4 guys fo sho!, forts were cool, Steelers vs.Cowboys everyday on the street 2 on 2.17 cent 16oz Pepsi's out of a glass bottle, I remeber throwina rockat abus and hitting a girl in the head, throwing a snorkle at my frined and hitting his eye, and another pineconeat a girls,lol; no lawsuits and we all did make it out alive.
dam I just remembered a VCR that we rented one summer cuz there was no money for vacation,lol; it had a long ass cord on it for the remote,lolol.

ok here's my theory on this, i've thought about this before. It wasn't till the last i 10-15 years that we've had all this antibacterial stuff. Almost every cleaning product has it.. So now the kids growing up in this protected enironment aren't exposed to these bacterias early in life when the imune system is strong so when they get older there system can't fight it as easy. Maybe i'm talking out my ass i did think of this theory while on the toilet

Quote: Originally posted by MR.G ok here's my theory on this, i've thought about this before. It wasn't till the last i 10-15 years that we've had all this antibacterial stuff. Almost every cleaning product has it.. So now the kids growing up in this protected enironment aren't exposed to these bacterias early in life when the imune system is strong so when they get older there system can't fight it as easy. Maybe i'm talking out my ass i did think of this theory while on the toilet

Actually, I bet that's a big part of it, Mr. G.. heh. If there's no germs around for our body to tackle when we're wee ones, then when we're exposed to them later, they'll probably pack a bigger punch because our bodies haven't encountered them before and built up at least a little resistance.

Thats bad for me I guess.

Thanks Scape,

Now I'm all depressed and feelin' sorry for myself for being so old. I wish I was 8 again.

Boy do I miss playing in the abandoned gravel pits and (up north) mine shafts.

Yup, Playin' cowboys and indians running through almost every back yard in the neighborhood, over fences and scampering up trees.

Most Moms stayed home and often fixed treats like Mrs. Egenburger's Davinity. And I remember having to be told about predjudice because I really had never heard of that. The Mentons lived right down the street and we played together all the time. Boy it was an eye opener to learn that them being black meant that some people might not like them because of it. Didn't make much sense at the time cause I had a hell of a good time with those boys. (sic..... I guess you gota grow into it ).

Fear is what it's all about, fear is why parants lock their kids inside, because you can't watch them all the time. Fear of all the bad things. Because the laws aren't enough, people have to be out their in the neighborhoods, parants looking out for each other's kids. But there is no more trust, lawsuits and liability, foolishness have destroyed it.

This is depressing me because I know in my heart that the world has not improved.

Nothin beats the good ole' 40' tree being removed from the backyard and having a huge hole where the stump used to be. We filled it up with water and and played in it. I think I was 5 at the time and was up to my neck in muddy water. It sure was fun! Mom and dad weren't too excited about it though

I remember playing tackle football in the double-long front yard created by 2 annonymous neighbors houses. We used to go up and knock on the door and ask "Can we play ball in your yard Mrs Sumerson?" She must have been nuts!? I can count more than 5 broken bones in that yard, let alone the partial impalement that resulted when I tackled my buddy Anthony into the large bush along the house. Then there was the time i tackled the son of a Orange County Deputy Sheriff by the head and caused the cornia of his eye to be scratched. A COP's SON! HA!

Then there was the incident at summer camp when i got bounced off a trailor that was serving as a hay-ride around the property, my legs were drawn between the tires and was run over then impaled in my posterior (ass) on a tree root that protruded from the road. You are talking to the potential owner of the YMCA corporation had my parents sued them. Millions, MILLIONS of dollars. I did spend the next 4 months in bed, unable to walk for more than 20 feet at a time. That was the one case where i kind of wish my parents HAD sued, it was actually liable for my accident... but anyway.

It was a simpler time, the 1980's. It all went down hill after i heard the first 2-Live Crew album. Damn rap music! HAHAHA!!!