BLACK AND WHITE

Black   and White (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.
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 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 taken Prozac.