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 icepack 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 butt spanked again when we  got home.

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?

    Pass  this to someone (over age 40, of course), and brighten their day by helping  them to remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best!