My mom used to
cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board
with the same knife and no bleach, but we did not seem to get food poisoning.
Our school sandwiches were
wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I cannot
remember getting E. coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach
instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took Phys, Ed .....
And risked permanent injury with a pair of PF Flyers instead of having
cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light
reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I cannot recall any injuries but
they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the paddle for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it
discipline, yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect
those older than us. We had 40 kids in our class and we all learned to read and
write, do math and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically
correct letter.
Staying in detention after
school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
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 Netflix. We weren't!!
Oh yeah ... And where was
the antibiotics 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 building sites
and when we got hurt, mom pulled out the bottle of iodine and then we got our
backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day
dose of antibiotics and then mom calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for
leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
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 never needed to get into
group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so
many societal ills, that we did not even notice that the entire country was not
taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?
For Aunty Acid by DouglasAnthony
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