I am a child of the seventies. It was a time of lack hook rug kits that you never knew what to with once they were finished. Macramé planters with big, brown wooden beads hung from every ceiling. There was string art, and parents didn’t worry back then about handing small kids hammers and nails. Of course there was knit or crocheted blankets hanging on the back of every couch, with the matching throw pillow cases. Who could forget such raging crazes as the mood rings that changed color, the bell bottoms that always got caught and chewed up in your bicycle chain (this was before chain guards), and believed the Dr. Schols’ ads that said if you wore their clog sandals, you’d get toner looking legs. The only thing you got were your toes stubbed as your feet would slide forward out the front of the sandals. It was the day when Foster Grants ruled the sunglass scene, and on your feet were either platform shoes, or cheap pop out roller skates that never turned easily and landed you face down on the pavement.

When I see boot cut jeans today, I wince. When I see those big floppy train engineer hats back in style, I cringe. Thankfully, I haven’t seen my red and white polka-dotted polyester pants make a comeback. When I tried to describe this to an eighteen year-old kid a few weeks ago, she asked, “What’s polyester?” I couldn’t find an example of the fabric to illustrate the hell all seventies children experienced.

To watch an old re-run like “All in the Family”, it’s not for the bigoted language to show us what we used to be like, but to look at the kitchen table that I still see on “Everybody Loves Raymond” (in the parent’s house), complete with the vinyl and chrome seats you’d stick to on a hot summer day. It’s to look at a TV set when you still had to get up and change the channel yourself, and as a kid, you didn’t mind doing that back then. And it was for the love of everything harvest gold and avocado green – the only two colors that existed back then if you look at your parents’ old scrapbooks (if you’re too young to remember). You chewed on the lead based paint and you didn’t go to the doctor’s office for every little thing – only for your mandatory school injections so your parents could find a few hours of peace and quiet before you returned home and reminded them, “why didn’t I take my birth control pills that day?!”

The front doors were all unlocked, and the ice cream man was the highlight of your day. If you were lucky, you weren’t going to be the one the other kids would sing about that day: “You ain’t go no ice cream!! You ain’t got no ice cream!”

You were super lucky if you happened to be at grandma’s house, where she rarely said no, and was always the epitome of grace even if she looked as wrinkled as laundry you leave in the dryer overnight as an adult. She never asked if you did your homework before you went out to play or she gave you a sweet treat, and you always lived close enough to walk to her house unsupervised. No one grabbed kids off the street back then – they were busy pushing them out, and I think secretly hoped we wouldn’t find our way back home.

It was super cool when Grandma let you help on her paint by numbers craft kits, and you always knew you could find a good, hearty meal at her house. The liberated working moms of the seventies all had the same curse: they cooked by fire alarms, and often used the broom handles to whack at them until they shattered and rained down pieces of sharp plastic. They had barely managed to avoid burning water with their domestic goddess skills.

I can remember reading a book about how the way it used to be in the 1940’s and laughing so hard I had tears running down my cheeks, with my curious schoolmates finally taking the book out of my hand to see what was so funny. The book talked about how the woman’s mom used to boil solid food into a liquid. They didn’t get it. My mom had been reducing solid food into a liquid for years – it’s called “Irish cooking”. Ham and bean soup? What ham?! I don’t see any ham in here! Are you sure there are beans in here? It looked and tasted the same always – like the box of wallpaper paste you used to buy at the small family owned hardware store around the corner.

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.