The Wayback Machine

I got this in the email and thought I would share. My additions are in Parenthesis...

To all the kids who were born in the 30's, 40's, 50's. 60's and 70's (like me!)

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
(I know my parents were high back then. I am a Puerto Rican man named Billy. Not William or Guillermo... Billy. Billy? Billy!?! That must have been some good stuff they were on...)

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

(That's all true but I or may not have done the following:
- Killed a mouse by biting it
- Get blown across a room when I discovered that you are not really supposed to insert bobby pins into electrical outlets
- Get mauled by a dog while trying to hug it whilst it was feeding
- Learned that if you run with bottles and fall with them that you are most likely going to require stitches...
- Discover that wiffle ball bats can in fact cause severe swelling in and around the facial area when applied with sufficient velocity
- You need to run when you break a window with a baseball, stickball, softball, rock, etc...
- Bus Drivers don't like it when you throw fake bodies in front of their busses when they are driving...
- Cats can land on their feet even after falling off a four story building but they are usually slow in getting up afterwards...
- You can pee out the window and not get caught if you wait until its late enough...
- Abandonded buildings are a great place to play The Continuing Advertures of Indiana Jones or a great place to shoot an episode of Rescue 911, depening on how the game turns out...)

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
(Right up until someone cuts you off and you slam on the brakes and there goes little Willy flying like that cow in Twister...)
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle (and occasionally we drank from the fire hydrant...). We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because...

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

(I could have inserted a Freeze Tag, Kick-The-Can, Hot peas and butter, come and get your supper reference right here but I will refrain from such frivolity.)
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on (or, in the case of my father, you would hear the whistle...).

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. (Sure there were pedophiles back then but we hung out in groups and we knew how to hit a pidgeon from forty yards with a straw and a pea shooter, what possible chance did Chester the molester have against us? Besides, we were always playing baseball or stickball so were loaded to the teeth with bats and sticks.)

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. (You'd be amazed at how fast you can go on one of those things while holding on to the bumper of a City Bus... Wait. My kids might read this one day. Forget I said that...)

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees (and jumped off of trucks in the junk yard...), 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. (No. No we didn't.)

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays (we couldn't have BB guns in Brooklyn... that would just give the cops an excuse to shoot you. But we did learn that you could do cool things with a platic juice bottle, a balloon and small rocks...),
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes (though many an apartment window paid the ultimate price..).
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for 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! This 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!

Then the email progressed into the "send this on to your friends..." portion. This brought me back to those days really quick. I will have to sit down and actually list out the insane things we did as kids growing up in Crown Heights.
After all, I lived to tell the tale.