What was my Mother thinking

[bfez1]

Subject: ahhhhhhhh the good ole days
>
>
>
> This is so good..... Some of it may have been around
> before but it's worth reading again for all of us
> "senior citizens".
>
>
> WHAT WAS MY MOTHER THINKING
>
> 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 icepack 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.
>
> Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson
> [and provided
> comic relief 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 sang the
> national anthem
> and staying in detention after school caught all
> sorts of negative
> attention. We must have had horribly damaged
> psyches.
>
> I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year
> olds
> condoms (we wouldn't have known what that 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, Play Station,
> Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
>
> I must be repressing that memory as I try to
> rationali! ze 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 lot, 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 (kids liked it better
> because it didn't
> sting like iodine di! d) 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 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 take 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 lawn mower and I
> didn't even know
> that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we
> got one without an
> automatic blade-stopper 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 i! t 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
>

[Stephanie]

It seems that with all of the "advances" we made in making ourselves safer and healthier, it really isn't working, is it?

[MomH]

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA

The youngins don't know just how much they have missed.

In about 1957, while I was a Junior in High School, our town passed an ordinance that required all businesses in town to lock their doors at night. Until then, no one ever bothered. Daddy had to give the cops a couple of keys to the back door of our cafeteria so they could get their coffee, sandwiches, and pie during the middle of the night. Every officer in the area knew they were welcome to help themselves during the night. Only rule was ----don't cut into anything new. We brewed fresh coffee at 8:00 PM, when we closed, so they could have it as fresh as possible.

It was sometime in the late 70's before my folks started locking their home when they left. Up until then the only time it was locked was if they were going off for a two week vacation.

Man--have times change.

[kevin]

Do you all think eating raw hamburger is good for you???

Obviously if you made it to be around nowadays you didn't get food poisoning and die, but I bet people still did back then!

<< does not buy for one second that things were better back in the day, but atributes it to selective memory

[kkcool]

Had a situation today that really made me long for "the good ole days". You remember the catalogs of stuff to sell in your neighborhood trying to raise money for the school? Two boys came by tonight with a catalog. I caught myself before I did, but I almost invited them inside. It went through my head all the possible trouble I could have gotten myself into. Everything from the boys trying something to their parents possibly accusing me of wrongdoing. My thought was only that it was hot outside and I didn't want to sweat while looking and if I was that hot the boys had to be miserable and would probably like something to drink. More than likely everything would have be fine and their parents would not have minded me giving them somehing to drink but I couldn't take that chance. Kinda sad about the world in general right now.

[breeze]

I never ate the meat raw, but, I DO remember licking the
spoon that Mama used to stir cake batter before she poured
it in the pan to bake, and, it DID have that raw egg in it!

Not anymore, though....LOL, no way!

[pojo]

even though I'm a young adult, I played many of times in a gravel parking lot.... king of the hill, football, kickball, etc.

Mom would say dont' come in until we were showing Blood... she'd put a bandaid and go back to what we were doing. That didn't stop us.

When we were younger we'd get to ride in my grandpa's 1980's surburban... we'd purposely go in the back to play pinball! We'd bounce around the back like a ball, laughing and having a good time.

We'd go sledding practically into the road. A local sled hill darn near goes into the road, there was only a horizontal wooden plank stopping us. Now there is a fence line on top of the hill. The more speed, the better... it was needed for a little nature/manmade hill just to the east of hill, right next to the road.

We'd build igloos in the backyard, didn't think the snow would collapse.