Childhood in Black & White.......
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| Wed, 03-04-2009 - 11:08pm |
We've heard this stuff before, but this is a version I had not heard before.
Makes ya wonder how we got through it and lived to tell of it......
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.
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 amock.
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 didn't need to get into group therapy and
anger management classes. We were
obviously 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, I'M
SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I
WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.
~~Donna~~



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For my birthday this year Tom took me to a nice high-end Japnese Hibachi Grill ... where they prepare the food in front of you and you sit at a grill table with groups of strangers ... I like those places ...
BUT ... when we entered there was a group of about 6 8-year old boys playing in the Water-fountain-wishing well ... snatching coins off the bottom ... Dad standing idly by .... Part of a birthday party for one of the boys ...
Then we went further into the restaurant ... and there was a grill table full of 8-9 year old girls ...
Sushi ... steak ... shrimp ... lobster???
This brought back some memories.
There is a few things that was different. It could be because of the area we lived in.
Oh, Pin the tail in the donkey, I forgot about that! We also blew up balloons and sat on them to pop them.
I prefer the simple grammy grampy parties too as it's more comfortable for me, but the kids sure have had tons of fun at the theme parties too.
When I was a kid, all of my friends had simple parties like mine except for two kids. One's mom was a teacher and they'd invite every kid in the class and had wonderful parties outside with a loooooong table for everyone to sit at. They really didn't do anything extra, it just seemed that way because it was big. The other party
It would have been more fun for those kids to make the sushi at home themselves and then eat it....
Oh Yes! the clamp on skates, used to tear off the soles of your shoes.
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Oh yes, I remember tearing off the soles of our shoes...we would try to glue them back so that mom wouldn't find out....LOL
LOL, my dad would glue them back on for me.
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I bought my dgc hula hoops and they had a blast with them.....
Along with all the electronic games,
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