KYOWVA Bulletin Inserts

SENIORS – GOOD MEMORIES

By Dr. Hoyt W. Allen, Jr.

The following article came to me recently and I contended that I should pass it on. It has been slightly edited and a conclusion added.

1) 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.

2) My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

3) Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).

4) The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school’s PA system.

5) 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.

6) I can't recall any injuries from wearing Ked’s, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer our shoes are now. We never would sue, but you could buy student school injury insurance for a $1.50 a year. That took care of the two broken arms I got at school. It even took care of the time I got hit in the head with a baseball bat at recess, but Mom said I'd be all right.

7) Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

8) Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

9) When we were kids we wore snow suits. We wouldn't hesitate to throw a snow ball on the play ground, but we wouldn't dare throw it toward the school. That might break a window. Today they don't go outside when it snows, because the school buses do not run.

10) I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Our school nurses wore a hat.

11) I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.

12) I must be repressing that memory as I recall building forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. Oh yeah, and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

13) 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 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 to her children.

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

15) I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

16) 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 an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

17) I recall the kid 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.

18) To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. Group therapy and anger management classes were unheard of.

19) We were obviously so duped by so many common ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we survive? I suppose we just knew how to live life.

20) All of us youngsters were made to attend Sunday School every Sunday and were taught some good old fashioned basics of life that has blessed our lives for many years. How dare our parents forcing religion on us – we maybe should have brought a suit against them.

Well, through all of our difficult days “growing up”, as we think about it, maybe things were just not too bad after all.

Plainly, don’t get short changed. Let’s be ready to meet our Maker. The Bible (in Acts) teaches that to avoid hell and gain heaven - one must: