When I was growing up ...

The only "juice" our baseball heroes knew about was orange or tomato.

The only jewelry athletes wore was their championship rings.

If you had one or two tatoos it meant you probably served the country as a sailor or Marine.

If most of your body parts were covered with tatoos, you were eligible to share the stage with the Bearded Lady and Rubber Man.

When I was growing up ...

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife but we never got food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper or aluminum foil in a brown paper bag or metal lunch box, not in ice-pack coolers. And none of us ever contracted e.coli.

Oh, yeah...where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got stung by a bee? My gosh, I could have been killed!

When I was growing up ...

I don't remember being bored, even though there were no computers, Wiis, X-boxes, or 220 cable TV stations.

"Cell phone" would have conjured up visions of a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

Our "home entertainment center " was the living room floor in front of our 21" TV or our console stereo record player/radio.

None of us had a $1500 swing set/playhouse/jungle gym in our backyard, so we played roller hockey on the street, and pick-up baseball and football on the school field--all without hundreds of dollars of protective equipment.

None of us owned a bike helmet.

When I was growing up ...

Our jeans were Levis and Lees with straight legs, worn at the waist. And never worn to school.

Our sneakers were the basic Nikes and Adidas'. Athletic shoes with air cushion soles, built in light reflectors and iPod transmitters at $149 a pair were unheard of.

None of us boys would be caught dead in a jacket or sweatshirt with a hood.

When I was growing up ...

A lot of kids in the neighborhood walked to school on a path through the woods behind our house. None of us was ever kidnapped or sexually assaulted.

When we got to school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention when we got home.

I remember Bobby Prentice doing his acrobatic tricks on the front step of my Dad's grocery store, just before he fell off. His Mom came out of the store and swatted him for being such a goof. I guess she didn't realize she could have sued my Dad and ended up owning the store...and maybe our house, too.

When I was growing up ...

Our school nurse dispensed aspirin and Pepto-Bismol freely and if our temperature wasn't over 100 she didn't send us home.

Nobody in our school was ever sent to group therapy or anger management classes. And none of us was made to take Rydalin, Conserta or dexadrine. (Thankfully, none it was invented yet, and our parents didn't have to worry about side effects.)

Not a single person I knew was told he or she was from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

How did we ever survive?