My Mum used to defrost mince-meat on the kitchen sink AND I used to eat a bite 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 anybody getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or the fast flowing river instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring). We could have all been drowned in such dangerous places.
The term mobile phone would have meant an extra phone plug in the house so you could actually move the phone and a pager was the school PA system.
We all played sport, and also did PE… and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop runners (only worn in the gym or the sports ground) 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 sport was not an option.. even for stupid kids! There were not many fat kids.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the National Anthem and got free school milk for strong bones and teeth, 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, and she could even give you an aspirin for a headache or fever.
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.
We climbed trees and 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 hair ruffled and got told to get back out there! 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 solicitor to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn’t misbehave at the mate’s house either, because if we did, we got our bum smacked there, and then we got belted again when we got home. I recall the kid from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front veranda, just before he fell off. Little did his Mum know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a yobbo.
It was a neighbourhood 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 (over age 30, of course), and brighten their day by helping them to remember that life’s most simple pleasures are very often the best!
