(Under the age of 40? You won't understand this but this is how...

(Under the age of 40? You won't understand this but this is how
we lived, And we are still here to talk about it.)

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, Johnny.' 'Good Night,Dad.'

My Mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayonnaise
on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach,
but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mum used to defrost mince on the counter AND I used to
eat it raw sometimes.
Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown
paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember
getting sick.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the dam
instead of our public pool (talk about boring).
There were no beach closures then either.

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 sandshoes 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.

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.
Then there was the milk left in the sun for us to drink each day. Good wasn't it?

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 34 digital TV cable stations.

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 castle' on piles of gravel left on vacant
construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mum 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 bum smacked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a
10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics,
and then Mum 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 neighbour's house either because if we
did, we got our bum smacked there and then we got smacked
again when we got home.

I recall 'Bluey' Barnes from next door coming over and doing his
tricks on the front porch, just before he fell off. Little did his
Mum know that she could have owned our house. Instead,
she picked him up and clipped his ears for being such a dill.
It was a neighborhood run amok.

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??