Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Black and White

My Uncle Carlos from Oklahoma sent me the following.
I don't remember most of the black and white world as he did. I am not as old as he is.
He has a birthday on August 24 and he will be really old.
Might have to send him a link to a web site for the old folks home!
Happy Birthday Carlos! I hope you still have all your hot air to blow out those candles!







Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)
Guess I do remember all the old shows!. I AM OLD! We ( I and Carlos) could have the same room in the old folks home together!

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,
'Good Night, David.
Good Night, Chet.'

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.

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. 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.
Oh yeah... and where was the Benadrylandsterilization 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) 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 our butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall the kid 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 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, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T---------- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING

1 comment:

Dan C said...

Oh boy I remember all that and then some. I remember the first TV I ever saw, it was at my Grand Parents house, the screen was only about six inchs in diamenter,and you did have to pull up a chair to see it. How maney of you remember a childrens show called Captian Zoom? not maney I bet, and then there was Engineer Bill. How maney of you remember playing red light green light with Engineer Bill? come on fess up.I know this makes us real old. One thing I remember well was waiting in front of my house on Sunday morning for the Sunday School bus. In my day almost all the Churchs had an old bus that would come to your house and take you to Sunday School. I know these buses didn't get inspected and were in ill repair, but some how, we made it to Church and back safely every Sunday. Thanks Ken for digging up these memorys. I wouldn't change a thing either. Dan