How did we survive?
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we actually lived as long as we have.
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 get food poisoning.
My mum used to defrost hamburger patties on the kitchen counter AND I used to even eat it raw sometimes but I can't remember ever getting something
called E-coli.
As children we would ride in cars without seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a ute on warm days was always a special treat.
Our cots, toys and rooms were painted with bright coloured lead based paints. We often chewed on the cot, ingesting the paint and I'm still not sick from the effects yet!
We didn't have childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes we didn't have helmets.
We drank water straight from the garden hose and not from bottles. We would leave home in the morning and play all as long as we were home before the street lights came on. Nobody was able to reach us all day. We played ball and other games and sometime the ball really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys & Indians, army, cops & robbers and used our fingers to simulate guns when our toys ones weren't handy.
We ate calorie-laden cakes, bread with heaps of butter and drank sugar filled fizzy soft drinks but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little athletics had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those that didn't had to learn to deal with the disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others, if they didn't work harder, they probably 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 in a pristine pool (talk about boring). The term cell phone would have conjured up pictures of a telephone in jail cell and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took sports and PE... and risked permanent injury in a pair of canvas sports shoes (only worn in the gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with built-in light reflectors at an exorbitant price. I really can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now! Flunking sports wasn't 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 lino floors and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew and we could have sued the school system. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang God Save the Queen - detention after school was an education hazard to be endured. We must have had horribly damaged psyches?
I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds condoms or abortions (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of aspirin and cough syrup if we started sniffling. What an archaic health system we had back then.
Remember school nurses? Ours wore white starched uniforms, 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 must have been without computers, Playstations, Nintendo, X-box or multiple satellite/cables stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalise through the denial of the danger that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant land, built forts out of old timbers, branches, plywood and corrugated iron, made trails and fought over who was going to be the Lone Ranger.
What was that property owner thinking? Letting us play on his land like that? He should have been locked up for not putting a fence around the property, complete with self-locking gates and camera surveillance with an intruder alarm - monitored of course.
Oh yeah and where was the Benadryl and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting I could have been killed!
We played king of the castle on piles of gravel left on construction sites and when we got hurt, mum, pulled out the 49 cent bottle of mercurochrome and then we got our butts spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room followed by a 10-day course of antibiotics ($49.00) and then Mum calls her lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving that vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat to our safety and her sanity.
We didn't act up at the neighbours' house because if we did, we got our butts spanked here (physical abuse/assault) and then we got our butts spanked again when we got home.
Mum invited the door-to-door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down dust from the gravel drive while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka truck were made so tough? It wasn't so they could take the rough Berber in the family room) and dad drove a car that burned leaded fuel - environmental vandal he was.
Our music had to be left inside when we out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on 2 week vacations.
I should probably sue the folks for the danger they put us in when we all slept in the family tent on camping grounds.
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 auto start or auto drive!
How sick were my parents?
Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Paul Clarken from up the road coming round and doing his tricks on the front doorstep just before he fell off. Little did his mum realise that she could have owned our house for that little incident. Instead she picked him up and swatted his behind for being "a right little fool".
It was a neighbourhood run amuck.
To top it all 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 on Prozac!
How did we survive?
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we actually lived as long as we have.
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 get food poisoning.
My mum used to defrost hamburger patties on the kitchen counter AND I used to even eat it raw sometimes but I can't remember ever getting something
called E-coli.
As children we would ride in cars without seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a ute on warm days was always a special treat.
Our cots, toys and rooms were painted with bright coloured lead based paints. We often chewed on the cot, ingesting the paint and I'm still not sick from the effects yet!
We didn't have childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes we didn't have helmets.
We drank water straight from the garden hose and not from bottles. We would leave home in the morning and play all as long as we were home before the street lights came on. Nobody was able to reach us all day. We played ball and other games and sometime the ball really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys & Indians, army, cops & robbers and used our fingers to simulate guns when our toys ones weren't handy.
We ate calorie-laden cakes, bread with heaps of butter and drank sugar filled fizzy soft drinks but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little athletics had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those that didn't had to learn to deal with the disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others, if they didn't work harder, they probably 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 in a pristine pool (talk about boring). The term cell phone would have conjured up pictures of a telephone in jail cell and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took sports and PE... and risked permanent injury in a pair of canvas sports shoes (only worn in the gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with built-in light reflectors at an exorbitant price. I really can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now! Flunking sports wasn't 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 lino floors and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew and we could have sued the school system. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang God Save the Queen - detention after school was an education hazard to be endured. We must have had horribly damaged psyches?
I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds condoms or abortions (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of aspirin and cough syrup if we started sniffling. What an archaic health system we had back then.
Remember school nurses? Ours wore white starched uniforms, 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 must have been without computers, Playstations, Nintendo, X-box or multiple satellite/cables stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalise through the denial of the danger that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant land, built forts out of old timbers, branches, plywood and corrugated iron, made trails and fought over who was going to be the Lone Ranger.
What was that property owner thinking? Letting us play on his land like that? He should have been locked up for not putting a fence around the property, complete with self-locking gates and camera surveillance with an intruder alarm - monitored of course.
Oh yeah and where was the Benadryl and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting I could have been killed!
We played king of the castle on piles of gravel left on construction sites and when we got hurt, mum, pulled out the 49 cent bottle of mercurochrome and then we got our butts spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room followed by a 10-day course of antibiotics ($49.00) and then Mum calls her lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving that vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat to our safety and her sanity.
We didn't act up at the neighbours' house because if we did, we got our butts spanked here (physical abuse/assault) and then we got our butts spanked again when we got home.
Mum invited the door-to-door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down dust from the gravel drive while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka truck were made so tough? It wasn't so they could take the rough Berber in the family room) and dad drove a car that burned leaded fuel - environmental vandal he was.
Our music had to be left inside when we out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on 2 week vacations.
I should probably sue the folks for the danger they put us in when we all slept in the family tent on camping grounds.
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 auto start or auto drive!
How sick were my parents?
Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Paul Clarken from up the road coming round and doing his tricks on the front doorstep just before he fell off. Little did his mum realise that she could have owned our house for that little incident. Instead she picked him up and swatted his behind for being "a right little fool".
It was a neighbourhood run amuck.
To top it all 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 on Prozac!
How did we survive?
