Back then it was ok for kids to play a game of horseshoes or lawn darts, and your parents always sat there with the backs to you, drinking Budweiser from the can with the pull tab ring that cut your finger. Nobody ran for the Neosporin and a Band-Aid – you sucked on your finger until it stopped bleeding and you went on, making sure to avoid Italian salad dressing you knew would burn your cut at the backyard picnic. The only antiseptic back then was iodine that stained your fingers red for what seemed an eternity. No one cut up the plastic rings that held the six-packs together because it wasn’t an issue if ducks at the dump were dumb enough to choke themselves on them.
You had the gas guzzling car that got ten gallons to the mile, and the super cool huge tail fins that you were always guaranteed to run into and get the wind knocked out of you as a kid when you played “Red Rover” and triumphantly smashed through the “enemy lines”. There was no such thing as seat belts or baby seats in those cars, and it was serious business calling “SHOTGUN!” for the front seat. Of course you had to drive around in those cars to understand the value of fighting over the front – the back seat had comfortable room for two (those cars were all trunk and engine) and the dreaded “hump seat”, that got hot as a frying pan. If you were last in the car or the smallest, you were sentenced to the hot seat. In winter it was great because the car heaters didn’t work worth a damn, and only the ultra rich had air conditioning. It was also the day in which some of the windows were for decoration only, and you had to have some strength to actually roll down the ones that did work because they stuck. You left kids in the car as you went into the grocery store, but most often, the unemployment lines.
The rich kids had small above ground swimming pools, and you always tried to make friends with them. The poor kids had the lawn sprinklers and you didn’t worry about water consumption back then. It simply kept the kids outside while your parents were having sex inside. If you were really good at begging and pleading, you moved up from the sprinkler to the HOT toy: the Slip and Slide.
For those of you who weren’t born yet, a Slip and slide was a heavy-duty plastic sheet that was like twenty feet long and the sides had little tubes with pinholes poked in them. You would attach the garden hose and out of the holes would come water to wet the plastic; you would run and dive down on the plastic and slide through a stream of water. The only problem is you could never find the rocks when you laid out the Slip and Slide…until you were sliding down it and it ripped you like the chain link fences you always got your bell bottoms snagged and torn on.
