The old swimming after eating thing sure was popular, wasn’t it? Looking back, my parents were pretty cool about almost everything. Heck we even had a dirt bike and a pellet gun, and managed to survive.
The one thing that stands out in my mind was that we couldn’t keep anything in the fridge in an opened tin, whether is was juice or vegetables, or whatever. Apparently some horrible interaction between the food or drink and the can causes severe illness.
If you went outside at night with wet hair, even if it was still 80 degrees and 90 percent humidity (gotta love growing up in Ohio) you would catch pneumonia and die. After one of my sisters did catch pneumonia (but survived), Mom felt completely vindicated about that one until the day she died.
My mother pointed out that I would surely die (or lose body parts) if I didn’t stop:
[ul]
[li]Catching rattlesnakes[/li][li]Bringing home scorpions and keeping them as pets[/li][li]Playing “hot potato” with my friends with firecrackers (well… smoking capsticks, but she considered them firecrackers)[/li][li]Sliding around on the iced-over pond and trying to blow holes in the ice with firecrackers (ok, those were actually M-80s, but don’t tell Mom)[/li][li]Playing tag with bovines[/li][/ul]
But you’re probably looking for some of the more mundane ones, which included:
[ul]
[li]Fork in the toaster. At least until I neglected to turn off a circuit breaker while working on an electrical outlet and melted my screwdriver - then she kind of forgot the toaster)[/li][li]Sitting too close to the TV would make me STERILE![/li][li]Even sitting in the shallow end of the pool immediately after eating was likely to give me cramps and cause me to double over, sink, and drown[/li][li]Watching the TV (or sitting too close to it) during a thunderstorm. We unplugged that baby when the first lightning stroke hit.[/li][li]I’m not quite sure what the problem was supposed to be about driving barefoot, but it was dire.[/li][li]Hitchhiking.[/li][/ul]
Reading in low light will make you go blind and sitting too close to the TV will give you square eyes.
On the other hand, I walked alone to school from age 4 (this was 1978 in a quiet neighbourhood).
“Stay away from the gypsy vans! :eek: They’ll steal you away.”
I don’t even know if they were actually gypsies, I just remember a gaggle of foreign people, dressed funny and hanging out by a van in the parking lot of Kmart. Apparently there was a thriving black market for stolen kids in Cleveland.
Oh, yeah, I got that one. During your period you could not:
Go swimming
Get in a bathtub
Exercise in any fashion
Flirt with a boy, because if you flirted with him, it might lead to sex, and if you have your period, sex is BAD, even if you’re married, but especially if you’re not, when it’s a sin anyway, and apparently a ‘double-sin’ if you’re both unmarried and menstruating.
Oh, and pregnancy! How did we get this far without our mother’s input into pregnancy? When I was pregnant with my first child, I was in my mother’s kitchen, and reached up to get something off the top shelf of the pantry. “Don’t do that!” my mother screamed. “Don’t you know if you raise your arms above your head you can wrap the cord around the baby’s neck???” Then, I, (showing great restraint by not rolling my eyes) reminded her that if that were true, I could not at any point during the pregnancy wear the kind of pull-over top I was wearing. That seemed to throw a wrench into her theory.
Didn’t stop her from spouting insanity, though. At one point, she was spouting off about how wrong interracial relationships were. At the time, A Different World was a popular TV sitcom that my mom liked. One of the stars of the show was Jasmine Guy, whose mother was white and father was black. She was, by most people’s standards, beautiful. So, in a failed attempt to fight my mother’s ignorance I said “OK, you know Jasmine Guy, from A Different World? She’s half black and half white; so, should she marry a black guy, or a white guy, or does she have to find someone racially mixed like her?” Confronted with actual logic, all my mother could say was (very irritably) “Let’s just drop it”.
We previously had lived by the “No driving barefoot” commandment until we moved to the Texas Gulf Coast.
As kids, we were always losing flip-flops at the beach. We started buying the cheapy 99 cent flip flops every trip at the Bait & Beer store, because of course, we would lose one and could stop on the way back out for a replacement. Sometimes the nice counter guy would sell us singles for half price, or he would let us buy them mix and match. The first time one of these cheapies got caught under the gas pedal while mom was driving *that *rule went right out the window. Literally.
Somehow, the sandal bent on the floor from her heel and when she tried to bring her foot off the gas, the bend made her toes press down upon the gas pedal. A slow panic only made her go faster. It was a hoot! My sister and I were in the back seat (of course, without seat belts) cheering mom on for screaming down the beach and through the sand dunes in her explosion-prone Ford Pinto. GO MOM GO!!!
After she regained control of the car, we were both beaten heavily about the head and face for laughing our butts off while mom almost got into an accident. Of course, it would have been fatal. DID WE FIND THAT FUNNY???
Good times. 