I am a survivor!!!

I had a very difficult childhood. It befuddles me how I survived. I am thankful that somehow I overcame the odds and thrived. Let me explain.

In my early years I did not have a cordless phone. If I wanted to have a private conversation – forget it! I would have stretch the cord to its breaking point trying to find a personal space out of my parents hearing range. Surely strangulation was inevitable. When my folks broke down and got a cordless phone – I thought my worries were over, how wrong I was! The phone came fully equipped with a 3 ft hard metal antenna that was always snapping off when I would walk under a doorway. To fix this problem I would finagle a makeshift new one with an old wire coat hanger, I could have gotten tetanus and perished.

Texting did not exist; in order to talk to a friend I would have to risk life and death. First, I would have to avoid strangulation or tetanus and call them. After contacting them I would have to get up, and head for the door. The door was at the bottom of a flight of stairs, I surely could have fallen and instantly broken my neck. I would head out the door on a journey (yes my young friends I would have to walk, I could not IM or text them) to meet them halfway between their house and mine. How could walking be dangerous you ask, I could have been lunch for a rabid coyote. If a friend was late meeting me I could not pull out my cell phone to insure they were safe. I would worry terribly, thoughts would come to my head “did they get kidnapped by a band of wandering gypsies?” How I did not drop dead right there from stress still amazes me.

This is just the beginning of how perilous life was in the olden days of the 1980’s. Take for example, if I wanted to play a game of baseball, I could not to do in the safety of my own home and just fire up the Wii. OH NO! I would have to go to the open field, get a bunch of other children (who were as stupid and death defying as myself) and play together. With human contact comes germs, luckily this was before the SARS epidemic.

Renting a movie was a MAJOR ordeal and very, very treacherous. Everyone would pile in my dads 1984 Chevy Chevette (not known for their 5 point safety standards) . Off to the rental store we went. Not only would we have to grab a movie, but also rent the VCR. This was a hulking heavy machine. If you were to drop it on your toe you would surely break it, a broken toe left unattended leads to gangrene and eventually an early demise. If you were fortunate enough to beet the odds of gangrene, at the very least you would sprain a finger from pressing the stupid Rewind button. This button was difficult to press, it took a ton of finger strength.

Wikepedia was something we never heard of. To research a school paper we would have to go to the library. This in itself seems safe enough, but you must delve a little deeper. The encyclopedias were old, and what goes hand in hand with old paper, you got it…paper mites! These harmless looking bugs could easily crawl into your ear canal and burrow directly to your brain, causing an aneurism. I know of no one who survived a paper mite aneurism in the 80’s. Sad!

It is with a heavy heart that some of my peers were not hardy enough to survive the 80’s. It was a difficult era. But for those that did, we will never forget cheating death and are proud to call ourselves SURVIVORS!