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I would not want to have to re-learn all those lessons again.
Ah, but if I could go back knowing much of what I've learned in 63 years it would be heavenly, even for just a day or two, while my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were still alive.
It was a time to revel in, if only we'd known it then.
I remember crying because Richard Chamberlain did not win an Emmy for Dr. Kildaire.
I remember penny candy.
I remember actually walking over a mile to school.
I remember the night my next door neighbor was declared "MIA" in Viet Nam.
I remember "sneakers" and "dungarees" instead of tennis shoes and jeans.
I remember Woodstock although I was just a tad too young to go (15 and I REALLY wanted to go).
What are the top ten things you love about being a baby boomer??
These, in no particular order, are mine:
--I inhaled
--I remember JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Jimmi Hendrix, John Lennon and Jim Morrison..and let's not forget Janis Joplin and John Belushi and Glida Radner
You inhaled AND remembered all of those people?? I am impressed!!
Just choking, ....errr...joking.
My favorite joke from the Boomer Daze was: What did one Dead groupie say to another Dead groupie when the effect of the <your drug of choice here> wore off?
Beatlemania (Ed Sullivan Show, anyone?)
Motown
Led Zepplin!
Watching a human walk on the moon - live.
Anti-war sit-in's
Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll
And sex couldn't kill you.
The original Star Trek
The Watts riots
Losing friends in Viet Nam.
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren't overweight. Why?
Because we were always outside, playing...that's why!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times,we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms. We had friends and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
our generation has produced some of the best risk-takers problem solvers and inventors ever.
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. If you are one of them: Congratulations!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?
My mother was born in 1912. "The year the Titanic sank." she used to say. She passed away a few years ago at the age of 94. Her short term memory was very diminished but she remained smart as a whip and beat everyone in Scrabble and Gin Rummy. She knew what was going on in the world.
I asked her how she felt about seeing nearly 100 years of history go by during her lifetime: cars, airplanes, radio, TV, social changes etc. She said it was amazing to look back and think about all the things that weren't that now were. But then she pointed out that I would be seeing awesome changes in my lifetime too. Every generation will.
So I thought about before TV, ball point pens, cinemascope, the Internet, Polio Vaccine, micro-wave ovens, computers, email, along with all the social changes that have come about in my lifetime.
Of course my list is shorter than my mom's by about 30 years but it is still non-the-less fabulous.
Kids our age learned valuable lessons in socializing, compromising and just plain fun by being taught by older kids how to play games and then we in turn taught the younger kids. I don't see that anymore. I know there are kids in my neighborhood but they are apparently inside learning to play games on their electronic devices or being taken to this or that lesson by their parents.
We had our own "kid" lives while out parents had their "grown-up" lives. We used our imaginations rather than having high-tech toys do it for us. We earned allowances and spent them wisely or foolishly but the idea was we earned them and they were ours. Watching TV was a privilege not a right.
We became fabulous because we were allowed to become fabulous. The kids we were gave rise to the adults we became. Good for us!
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