Back in the Day... and Happy Father's Day

For those of you that are too young to have experienced this wonderful era, forward this e-mail onto your parents and grandparents.

Now Scroll and I think you'll enjoy it. Whoever wrote this must have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a 'T.'

Hope you enjoy it.

(Under age 40? You won't 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,

'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 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), 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. We all wore white, short sleeved, buttoned shirts and (short) blue
shorts for gym, washed over the weekend and brought back clean on Monday.
We all took showers at end of Gym before going to our next class.
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 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 our butt spanked again when we got
home..

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 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!

Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.
Disclosure: the above was sent to me this morning by my friend and I thought I'd share it with everyone.

The very first gift I bought my dad for Father's Day was a shoeshine kit from Piggy Wiggy. I made such a secret about buying it with my own money while my dad shopped. I was six years old and had an allowance. I still have that shoeshine kit from my dad's things. Funny the stuff I save....
In the years to come, my dad recieved a lot of Old Spice. I have that same set-up as in the photo... I kept it to remember my dad. I laugh at the things I brought to Costa Rica but I'm glad I did! It makes "a stranger in a strange land" feel like it's home.

This Sunday, I got it right. Happy Father's Day!!