| 03/09/09 08:08 AM |
#3
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Earl McHugh
I received this email, and i thought it was appropriate to share:
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. 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?
Our's 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.
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.
Pass this on to someone and remember
that life's most simple pleasures are
very often the best
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