BLACK AND WHITE?

Black and White

(Under age 40? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow, and you got the day off school to play with sleds, but you also had to shovel the driveway.

It was your job to cut the grass on the weekends. No one hired a "yard maintenance" fellow to do it for you.

 To get good reception on the TV you would spread  the rabbit ears as far as they go and if that didn't work you would hang a coat hanger off one of them. We even had to get up to change the channels, once in awhile adjust the horizontal and the vertical.

 We would pull a chair up to the TV set so we could see better.  Our TV was round.

"Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet." The nights when Ed Sullivan came on the entire neighborhood would come to our house to watch.

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.  We had neighbors ( and we did sometimes too) to borrow a cup of sugar or an egg or whatever.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

I remember the boys trying to kiss all the girls and not one parent sued for sexual harassment.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or the irrigation canal  instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring),  and there were no beach closures then.

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.  We all had to "change" for gym and shower after gym.

Flunking gym was not an option - even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.  Who remembers calisthenics? I sure do! We did them everyday.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.  In grade school standing in the coat room was so embarrassing because all of the other kids made fun of you for getting into trouble.  It wasn't something to laugh at or make you more friends.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

What an archaic health system we had  then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a white uniform and a hat. She also gave the inoculation shots when the time came for our shots or boosters.

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 a scrape and what was an allergy? I could have been died!

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 butts 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. I didn't act up at the neighbor's house or in stores or restaurants either; because if I did, I got my butt spanked when I got home.  I remember riding home in the car with my mom and she would say, "You know when you get home you will get a spanking for doing...." About 10 minutes from home I would start crying because my mom always kept her promise.

I remember a friend from down the way coming over to play and she fell off the horse we were riding. Little did her Mom know that she could have owned our house.  It was a society run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew, was ever 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 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. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER?