How did we survive

“This was emailed to me from my brother.. the author is unknown but he hit the mark with this one!
Subject: How did we survive?

The real question is, How will we (this current generation) survive?????
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding
in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often
chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and
when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden
hose and not from a bottle. We would leave home in the morning and play
all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was
able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball
would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army,
cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones
or the BB gun was not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never
over weight; we were always outside playing. Little League had tryouts and
not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with
disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work
hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.
That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we
learned how to deal with it all.
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 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.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the
halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How
much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the
school system. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge
(amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention
after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two
weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. Schools didn't offer 14
year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was
anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if
we started getting the sniffles. 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, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the
denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day
about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of
branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be
the Lone Ranger.

What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He
should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property,
complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm. 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 and then we got butt-whooped. 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
butt-whooped (physical abuse) there too... and then we got butt-whooped
again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down
the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks
(remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could
take the rough berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded
gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure
that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on
two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger
they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.
Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that
mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic
blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Harry Hinson
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 pick 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 survive?”

“That author might be unknown, but he must have grown up in my neighborhood because he talks just like I do! Now quit being such a goof, Sparky!”

“some didn't survive.”

“That is true, Mr. Tinkles. The problem is "How much caution is too much? When is a lawsuit beyond reasonable?"”

“Nostalgia, what is good for?

Absolutely nothing!

But it is fun to remember walking about a mile in Washington, D.C. to the $0.35 movie and having a $0.05 soda at the drug store.

So, you ate a bunch of lead paint, huh?
That 'splains a few things.”

“I pretty much grew up in a one horse town
no new housing, old ones being torn down
dogs running loose, that no one clamed
not being hauled into court, if I got blamed
a lovely place to grow up and be a kid
a place I lived down some of the stuff I did
where nothing to do didn`t give you any chance to be lazy
we had to think for ourselves and come up with stuff to drive the folks crazy
now grown to be a man, that scrawny, misfit, kid elf
lost off in a one horse town, seems I up and found myself”

“Birch got to run wild as a kid. I had to tell my mother if I went around the block and was forbidden to into the woods,(I'm getting back at her now for that), or on the railroad tracks. I did have a bb gun though.”

“My slingshot beats your BB gun. I also had a BB pistol and BB rifle. Surprise I didn't shoot out my eye.”

“Don't forget about going out on Halloween. I would leave as soon as it got dark and not return for hours. I would take a paper sack or two fill them both up, go home and get another one....lol
People would welcome you into their homes and give you homemade cookies, brownies, fudge, carmel apples and popcorn balls. Nowdays you throw away the homemade items and you take the rest to the hospital to get it
x-rayed to see if anyone stuck something in it. You only let your child go to the homes of people you know or trust.
How did I ever survive Halloween all of those years.”

“I had a slingshot, bb gun, and me and my friend Pete made rather sharp wooden swords and sharp wooden spears with the tips hardened in fire. YEs, our parents knew we played with these things. We ran around in the woods like little savages.

Ah, those were the days!”

“We used to make bows and arrows too.

I accidently (really) hit my brother in the head with a lead pipe. Didn't hurt him.

We also used to roam all over the creeks and swamps in FL, usually in a 9 ft boat with a 1.5hp motor. When we weren't on the water we were in the woods.”

“I spent most of my childhood rambling 'round the woods near my house. God, I miss it. No more woods there now though. The whole area got developed. Sucks bigtime.”

“Eggin' houses!!!
Launching snowballs at cars
Crawlin thru the rain sewers
the BMX trails
Neighborhood wars.
Gus, the golden ret. and Mr. Greeley's 'clapper'
Snake and frog hunting in the creeks.
My GT80 and the golf course.
Playing spin the bottle with Jan A.

,,,countless other unmentionables with family and friends. I would love to do it all over again. Folks put that stuff down cause there will be a day when you which you should of.”

“Briar Rabbit, don't forget rolling someones house with toliet paper. Sure wish I had pink tp to use back in those days.”

“We had mental hospitals that you could run around in the tunnels of. It was freakin' creepy! All sorts of crazy "devil worshiper" graffiti and burnt to stubs candles. You'd pop out in different buildings like wards, or the bowling alley, pool, etc. It was a weird place. Of course, I never ran around in them...I just went to my friend's house to spend the night.”

“Me, my siblings and the neigbourhood kids used to explore abandoned houses and warehouses. Now to think about it...it were pretty dangerous...lots of holes in the floor, loose stairways and stuff hanging off the ceiling.”

“Sass, that reminded me of the time several of us snuck into Fort Washington under the cover of darkness. don't tell my kids!”