If you're over 40 you'll know what these mean. If you're under 40 SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
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 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 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.
Can you remember any if your childhood friends growing up getting sick enough to need health insurance outside of teh occasional broken limb due to playing?
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?
18 comments:
"It was a neighborhood run amuck".
Wow, yours too?
My little brother liked riding down the hill one street over while standing on the seat of his bike until he fell off and had to get stitches.
Meanwhile, I'd go out in the morning on my bike with a couple of friends, ride 3 miles over to Revere Beach, hang out all day, eat hot dogs and godknows what else and not come home until suppertime.
The neighborhood dogs ran loose all over the neighborhood and in and out of our kitchen.
They were building a major highway 3 streets over which made a great play site evenings and weekends.
Never remember anybody suing anybody else for anything.
I had a trapeze set in the side yard. I was catch man.
I had a tree fort and used to parachute out -- 40 foot drop. I never broke a bone.
I had numerous box turtles for pets. Never once got salmonella poisoning.
Every other kid I knew had a bb gun and target practiced on the property. Nobody got injured.
I picked and ate wild strawberries without washing them. Never got sick.
Mom turned me loose in the morning to wander the surrounding fields with the instruction, "Come back for lunch." I judged lunch time by the position of the sun in the sky.
Yep, I survived -- and so did all of my friends. And not a single one of us ever had to make a trip to the ER, either.
Wow, I didn't know parachutes worked at 40 feet. Oh, the missed opportunities.
"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 wife still does
"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."
My lunches still are. And I don't put them in the fridge until lunch (they seem to disappear when I do)
"Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring),"
Still do
"Flunking gym was not an option... Even for stupid kids"
Flunking gym now means I dropped the barbell on my f'ing head. Hate it when that happens. . .
"We must have had horribly damaged psyches"
No comment
"Oh yeah... And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting?"
Spit and dirt made a mud paste that eased the sting
"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"
Ok, once it took forty stitches to close my leg. Still have the scar. They skipped the spanking on that one.
"I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off"
Donny fell into the cactus (sprawling prickly pear) in front of our house while trying to impress my daughters. Took his mom and dad HOURS to get those spines out. No spanking for that kid either.
How about sledding down hills through the trees on rickety old sleds and getting airborne on a 10 ft sudden drop? You lived for those wipe outs.
Or the old 100ft tree you used to climb. I tried it several years ago. Only to find I ain't 15 anymore.
So went to the gym and dropped a dumbbell on my f'ing head. . .
The food stuff sounds terrifying to me, but the rest not so much, and I'm 30. We wore Keds in gym class. We sang the national anthem anthem. We prayed in school. We would sled down the gravel piles at construction sites in the winter. That was a blast. We used to do jumping tricks on our bikes in the cul-de-sac until I flew over my handlebars and got a concussion. My grandma used to put onion on our bee stings and nothing works better than that.
Onion? Going to have to remember that.
Dude, do I ever remember those times. We had great times back then.
And, by the way, I swear to God, this is a true story:
I took my eleven year old daughter, and eleven year old niece to the park about four months ago, and I expected that they'd play while I read a book on a park bench.
Instead, they sat on the bench with me. After about a minute they started to complain that they were bored.
I said, "Go play. Look at all the hills and trees. Go get lost. Have fun."
And then, my niece said something to me that shocked and saddened me. She said,
"Uncle Pastorius, my mom (that would be my sister) says that when you were kids you used to go outside and play and stuff."
She said it with wonder, like, how could we possibly have done such a thing.
She couldn't imagine it.
;-(
By the way, I remember being 8 years old, and walking to the Boys Club (which was 3 miles away) with my friend to play basketball, and then walking back home again.
No parental supervision for hours at a time, and walking through "bad neighborhoods" and everything.
A neighborhood run amok, indeed.
:)
Like i said, those were great times.
Pasto, having raised 2 to adulthood (and I lived to tell the tale) and having an eleven year old myself I can see the difference between the way I was raised and my older daughters were raised and betwen the way my older daughters were raised and my youngest is.
When I was 13 or 14 to take my bike and ride all over the mountain all day (you know which mountain -- got a Japanese Pagoda on it) was nothing. To spend all day hiking on the mountain behind your mom's old house was nothing. My mom & dad didn't worry. Except I might do something stupid like fall off a cliff, or slide down the mountain bike first (it happened, misjudged the curve laid that sumbitch down and slid. gravel in the knees. it hurt. alot)
When the older 2 were younger we could let them ride around the neighborhood but not much further until they got older.
Now, you need to worry about letting them ride up the street. And NOT because you're afraid they may slide down the mountain bike first or fall out of the tree and break a bone -- that's part and parcel of growing up (daughter # 2, rugby player. Broke her nose at a college game once when she was a freshman. "Give her something cold to put on it" someone yelled. I have a picture of her holding a can of Miller on her nose. . .)(multipleshoulder dislocations,too)(daughter # 1 broke her arm when she tripped carrying baby sister and covered her up with her arm to protect her head from the concrete)(my girls are tough) but because you never know what kind of idiot may try to snatch them.
THAT'S sad.
Still, we are always telling the young one to go play outside. And she almost always does, although sometimes we have to take the book away from her :)
I like your stories, guys, and it is more than obvious what separate us from the leftard perpetual victims who expect Big Government comes to save the day: and that is the will to fight, never give up and reject everyone who tells you that you should be complacent and a good sheep just because you are entitled to this or that.
This is (I think) the mentality that separates us right-wingers from the losers with an overblown sense of entitlement.
I'm so glad that my parents are older than those of most people my age, come to think of it.
Yeah, onion provides instant pain relief for bee stings. Don't ask me how.
RRA,
Wow, I didn't know parachutes worked at 40 feet. Oh, the missed opportunities.
"Worked" might be the wrong word.
JDamn,
Onions work like a charm for bee stings. Much better than a baking soda paste.
And kerosene for a smashed finger or stubbed toe -- provided there is no break in the skin.
"Uncle Pastorius, my mom (that would be my sister) says that when you were kids you used to go outside and play and stuff."
She said it with wonder, like, how could we possibly have done such a thing.
She couldn't imagine it.
Really sad.
BTW, we never wore helmets when biking. I know about the safety factor and all, but we learned to fall carefully. We never biked on a busy street, either.
AOW,
I'm 46. I still never wear a helmet when biking OR SKATEBOARDING. And yes, that means I do still skateboard.
Call me crazy.
I've never worn knee pads or elbow pads either, though if I were going to be skating pipes or bowls I would, of course.
But, I just skateboard around on the street, going down little hills and stuff with my nephew. And yes, no helmets.
What are these helmet things of which you speak? I never wear kneepads when I rollerblade, but I'm already paying for that.
That's so sad about your niece, Pasto. When my sister and I were kids we used to beg and plead to go outside in the rain and the snow and every kind of weather. I can't remember ever being cold or hot or caring at all. My parents were only concerned about us tracking mud inside.
Yep, and from the time I was 11 I was hopping on the bus with my friends and our Boogie Boards for the 25 mile ride to the Newport Pier, where we would spend the entire day, not getting back until about 7:00 PM.
You lived somewhere it snowed, I lived somewhere near the beach. We both enjoyed the beauty of nature around us.
I have a feeling my kids don't really much feel a part of nature.
I do.
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