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."
Depending on the channel you tuned,
You got Rob and Laura or Ward and June.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys,
Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys,
Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train,
Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane.
Father Knows Best, Patty Duke,
Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too,
Donna Reed on Thursday night!
Life looked better in black and white.
I want to go back to black and white.
Everything always turned out right.
Simple people, simple lives.
Good guys always won the fights.
Now nothing is the way it seems,
In living color on the TV screen.
Too many murders, too many fights,
I want to go back to black and white.
In God they trusted, alone in bed, they slept,
A promise made was a promise kept.
They never cussed or broke their vows.
They'd never make the network now.
But if I could, I'd rather be
In a TV town in '53.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I'd trade all the channels on the satellite,
If I could just turn back the clock tonight
To when everybody knew wrong from right.
Life was better in black and white!
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Another Goody For The Old-timers
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 ecoli.
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 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.
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 neighborhood 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 taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY
FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
Grandparents
One of the most powerful handclasps is
that of a new grandbaby around the finger of a grandfather. ~ Joy
Hargrove
It's amazing how grandparents seem so
young once you become one.
Grandmas are just moms with lots of frosting.
The
best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents. You feel
completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida . ~ Dave Barry
Nobody can do for little children what
grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives
of little children. ~Alex Haley
