"Good night and God bless."
Go all the way to the bottom
past the pictures... I think you'll
enjoy it. Whoever wrote
this must have been my next door
neighbor because it totally
described my childhood to a 'T.'
Hope you enjoy it.
Black and White
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.
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,
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 neighbourhood 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!
Remember that life's most simple
pleasures are very often the best.
