BEFORE REMOTE CONTROLS

(Under age 40? You may not understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,

Remote control wasn't invented yet.

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 .

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 PE .. and risked permanent 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.

Flunking PE was not an option .. even for stupid kids!

All you had to do was participate & do your best.

Speaking of school, we all said The Pledge of Allegiance

(the under God version) and staying in detention after

school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

What an archaic health system we had then.

Remember school nurses?

Ours wore a white nurses uniform.

We had to accomplish something before we were

allowed to be proud of ourselves.

I just can't recall how bored we were without

computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or

270 digital TV cable stations...wait that's because

we went OUTSIDE to play with our friends in person.

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 did)

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 there and then we

got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall my best friend coming over and doing 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?

I guess 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 needed to be taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA,

I WOULDN'T HAVE TRADED IT FOR ANYTHING.

AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T.

SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.