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In childhood we rode in cars without seat belts and airbags. Medicine bottles didn’t have safety caps, doors were often left unlocked and wardrobes weren’t locked at all.
We drank water from the drinking fountain on the corner, not from plastic bottles.
No one would even think of riding a bike wearing a helmet. Terrible! For hours we put together all kinds of little vehicles from planks and pram wheels and only when we were hurtling downhill did we remember we didn’t have brakes.
Only after crashing into thorny rose bushes a few times did we learn that it’s not the same without brakes.
We left home in the morning and after school we played who knows where outside. We came home when the first streetlights came on. No one knew where we were all day. Cell phones didn’t exist.
Sometimes we got cut, broke a leg or knocked out a tooth, but no one blamed anyone. It just happened.
No one even thought that it might not be entirely our fault. Do you remember? And how many times we got into fights and walked around with bruises! But we didn’t pay any attention to them.
We survived on buns, licked ice cream and drank lemonade, but none of us gained weight from it because we were forever running around and playing.
Several people drank from the same bottle and none of them got sick from it.
We didn’t have PlayStation, computers, 165 channels of satellite TV, CDs, cell phones, tablets, or the Internet.
We went to watch films at whoever had a TV at home — there were no videos back then either. But we had friends.
We went out with them. We rode bikes, threw sticks into the stream or creek, built little ponds and mud dams, played tag, sat on park benches or on the railings at school and talked about all sorts of things.
When we wanted to talk to someone, we simply went to them, rang the bell or knocked, the door opened … Straightforward!
Without permission, without accompaniment, without protection! Alone in that cruel and dangerous world!
How did we even survive that? We played dodgeball with a ball or hockey with sticks and old sneakers, rang strangers’ doorbells, went to pick apples and pears in other people’s gardens, swallowed cherries with pits and, surprisingly, those pits didn’t start growing in our stomachs. Everyone tried at least once to sign up for the football team or for hockey, girls for gymnastics … not everyone got in.
We learned to cope with disappointment. Our actions were ours. We were prepared to bear the consequences. There was no one to hide behind.
Our generation gave the world many people capable of taking risks, handling problems and creating something that hadn’t been here yet, that didn’t yet exist. We had the freedom to choose, the right to risk and to fail, we had responsibility and we learned to deal with it all.
