Humor: I Remember When

This was email to me. I like it so much I wanted to share.

Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach. She must have been trying to give us all food poisoning!

And she 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 don't remember getting E coli.

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

We all took gym, not PE... and risked injury with a pair of high top Ked's 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.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running down the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be if we had only known we could sue 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.

Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or cable TV.

I must also be repressing the dangers as we trekked about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking? 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 lots and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it 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 antibiotics and then Mom sues the owner for leaving a 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) and then we got spanked again when we got home! So unfair!

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 that didn't even have an automatic blade-stop or 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 group therapy and anger management classes? Who knew?

We were obviously so duped by societal ills that we didn't notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?