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.

As children we would ride in cars
with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck
on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs, toys and rooms
were painted with bright colored lead based paint.
We, often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles,
doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets.

We drank water from the garden hose
and not from a bottle.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day,
as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
We played dodge ball
and sometimes the ball would really hurt.

We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians,
army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers
to simulate guns when the toy ones
or my BB gun was not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter,
and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight;
we were always outside playing.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn't,
had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren't as smart as others
or didn't work hard so they failed a grade
and were held back to repeat the same grade.

That generation produced some of the greatest
risk-takers and problem solvers.
We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and
we learned how to deal with it all.

Almost all of us would have rather
gone swimming in the lake instead of
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
a lesson by running in 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 prayers and the pledge
and staying in detention after school
caught all sorts of negative attention
through out the next two weeks.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

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 baby 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 accomplish
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,
and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger.
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 mercurochrome
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 cake 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 two week 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 lawnmower
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 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 survive?

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