~ Growing Up Is Hard To Do.... ~

Are your toes tapping, your fingers snapping? Let's take a stroll ... (remember the stroll......)

Someone asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'
'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I informed him. 'All the food was slow cooked.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'
'It was a place called 'at home,'' I explained! 'Mom cooked every day & when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, & if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.
But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it.

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis , set foot on a golf course, travelled out of the country or had a credit card. (I remember the furor of our parents over the 'invention' of credit cards & the fear of them, swearing never to have one).

My parents never drove me to school. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, & only had one speed, (slow), or we walked everywhere.

***(Important paragraph) We didn't have a television in our house until I was 14. It was, of course, black & white, & the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the NATIONAL ANTHEM & a poem about GOD; it came back on the air at about 6 a..m. & there was usually a locally produced news & farm show on, featuring local people. (TV test patterns came on TV after the last show, staying on all night until TV started in the morning. We only had a couple of channels to view.)

Before television we gathered around the radio to hear Lassie & The Lone Ranger & The Shadow Knows, etc.

I never had a telephone in my room.The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen & make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not even heard of. Milk was delivered to our door & in the winter the cream would pop up out of the bottle top.

All newspapers were delivered by boys & all boys delivered newspapers --my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

Remember how we thought we were so cool 'smoking' those candy cigarettes.

The restaurants had tableside jukeboxes. Remember those old glass soda bottles that had a stopper with holes punched in it, used as a clothes sprinkler.

Remember hand signals used in driving our cars, as automatic signals weren't invented yet?

How we kids used to pick strawberries & raspberries all day in that hot sun in the summer to earn money.

A fun day was running through the sprinkler hose to stay cool in the summer. The hours of playing cards, jacks, hop scotch, kick the can ...

Growing up just isn't what it used to be, is it?

What a fun conversation of yesteryear ... TY Marg, it was fun sharing memories.

NOTE ~ Visit our new blogger lady ~ she just started tonight. shabbycottageshoppe.blogspot.com