Accrington Web - Those were the days ....

Found this in a biker mag; it's a little long, but as I am more or less snowed in, I'll inflict the whole thing on you:D

"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 poinsoning.

She used to defrost hamburger on the counter, and I used to eat it raw sometimes too, and 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.

"Cell phone" would have conjored up images of a phone in a jail.

In school, we said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention caught all kinds of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged pshches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion, or condoms; but they did give us a couple of aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then.

I thought I had to accomplish something before I could be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Playstation, X-Box, and hundreds of digital tv channels.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of dangers that could have befallen us as we trekked off about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of branches and bits 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 fencing off his property.

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we go hurt, mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the ER, followed by a 10 day dose of $49 a bottle antibiotics, and then mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribley vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at our neighbour's house either, because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) and then got spanked again when we got home.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play, and I'm 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 mower, and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors untill I was 13; and we got one without an automatic blade stop or an auto drive. How sick were my parents! I recall that Donny Reynolds from next door came over and did his tricks on our front stoop before falling 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 neighbourhood 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 possible know 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 and Peace to all who shared this era ... and for those who didn't, I'm truly sorry."