I take absurd pleasure in a meme that appears on Facebook and in random e-mails. It wonders how baby boomers ever survived their dangerous childhoods. Riding bikes without wearing helmets? Living in houses layered in lead paint? Drinking whole milk?
Yup. We did all that and more. How did we make it to adulthood? He-he. I think it’s a shame the way kids are coddled today, often to their detriment. I enjoy recalling those fun days. To think I thought my parents were overprotective!
The question, however, is not rhetorical. How did we do it?
For starters, I must say that bad things happened to children in the 1950s and ‘60s. I was participating in a school-yard race and as I stretched one leg behind me, I stuck my bare ankle right into the spike of a barbed-wire fence. My sister was bit by a dog as she sat on the swings. She also stuck her hand into the blades of a manual lawn mower our mother was dragging backward, and nearly cut her finger off. A neighbor child wandered into a small pond and nearly drowned. One schoolmate hit a line drive on the playground and smacked another student straight in the eye.
It used to be, when things like this occurred, people would say, in so many words, “Life Happens.” Now, they call Joe Bornstein.
We have become a litigious society. There are times when people or companies are negligent, and should be made to pay. But we have gone way, way overboard. A classic example is the woman who sued McDonald’s because she spilled coffee on her lap. Only in America could it be argued that wasn’t her own stupid fault.
As a result of suit frenzy, laws have become stricter. Directions on normal household items now warn, in English and Spanish, that misuse can cause injury or death. We seem to have forgotten that a ballpoint pen can cause injury or death if it is shoved with force into a victim’s windpipe.
The plethora of over-the-top regulations on transporting children is one of my favorite bugaboos. One of my earliest memories is going with my father to pick up my mother and new sister at the hospital. I don’t know why, but the back seat in the car had been removed. Perhaps my father had been carrying something large back there. Anyway, he didn’t bother to put it back in for the 10-mile trip. I merely stood the whole way, one hand holding on to a stuffed animal, the other to the back of the front seat. Needless to say, I wasn’t strapped to anything.
My father later bought an Arnold Bread franchise. He had a box truck from which he made deliveries to restaurants, supermarkets and convenience stores. In the early days, when I was around six, he had installed wooden racks in the truck to hold the boxes of bread, rolls and cookies. I would often accompany him on his route during school holidays, and one of my favorite parts of this adventure was curling up for a nap in a big empty box on a shelf as Dad drove home. The horror!
Then there was the Plymouth station wagon. As an adolescent, I dreamed of station wagons. I envisioned myself lying in the back compartment, away from my parents and my pestering sister, my cassette player purring next to my ear. Did I mention that Dad smoked? He always cracked his window, but I hated the smell. In my dream, I lay far removed from the smoke and, in my prone position, did not become car sick, as I was wont to do.
My parents finally bought a station wagon. It was all I hoped it would be, and I have lived to tell the tale of flopping around unsecured all the way from Massachusetts to Florida—several times.
I don’t remember that any children I knew died while I was growing up. Polio was rampant in my earliest years, though; I was very much afraid of contracting it and having to spend my life in an iron lung. The son of one of my father’s best friends developed leukemia—which was quite a rare occurrence—but he did survive. Death, however, was something we knew about it. And we knew it could happen without warning, or any obvious reason. We did not touch dead bodies, but our parents had.
My father found his grandmother dead on the floor when he came home from grammar school one day. My mother was named after a sister who expired in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Her mother died in her fifties, in her home, and her daughters washed her and laid her out in the living room for the wake.
They had lived through the Depression and the war, and knew that every sunny, peaceful day was a blessing, not an entitlement. There are no guarantees in this life.
I just heard a story on the radio about girl softball players wearing masks on the field. Not just the catchers—everyone. What has changed about softball that female players now have to take such extraordinary precautions? Have these women developed arms of steel? Are they foolishly placing themselves in harm’s way?
I have never been a good athlete, but I always played intramural sports. Aside from the classmate who was beaned, I never saw anyone hurt, nor was I, a klutz extraordinaire, ever injured. How much fun would I have had if I had to wear a mask? I probably wouldn't have played.
The story also reminded me of a faded newspaper clipping that shows my father and his friends in 1960, when I was four. Their softball team had won a championship. They are grinning, yet they wear simple caps, not helmets, and the only one with a mask is the catcher. Were they insane? Or just lucky enough to live in a time when life was meant to be enjoyed, not feared?
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