The Good Old Days?

GOLDEN
Υ Ε Α R S
The New Milford Times June 5, 1998
The Good Old Days?
 BY TERRI ANDERSEN Contributing Writer
Were the “good old days” really so good? I can think of a few things that are much better today. For instance, buying a chicken to cook for dinner. In the good old days, my family lived across the street from a live chicken market, where the cackling could be heard all over town. Sure, when you went in for a chicken, you knew you were getting a real fresh one because you saw it strutting around just a few minutes ago. But after the butcher caught it and cut off its head (yuk, I can remember my stomach turn squeamish whenever I witnessed that), the housewife had to pluck all the feathers and take out all the innards when she got the chicken home. As I watched my mother do those messy jobs in our kitchen, I remember telling her, “I’m never going to do that when I grow up.” “If you want to eat chicken, you will,” she answered. But I insisted that’s one job I'd never do, and thanks to the industry’s progress, I never had to. (Guess you figured out by now that I was not brought up on a farm.) How about permanent waves in the good old days? The first perm I ever got was so traumatizing I swore I’d never get another one. They wrapped my hair around tiny curlers that were attached to a bunch of wires connected to a big domed electrical contraption. As I sat under it for what seemed like an awfully long time, I was sure I could smell my hair burning to a crisp. Of course, you couldn’t move while all the beautifying was going on, and when I looked in the mirror after it was over, all I could think of was steel wool pads. (Thank goodness for today’s lotions and conditioners.) Another memory I don’t cherish is the cold-water flat we lived in in Brooklyn, N.Y. The only heat came from a double duty stove in the kitchen (the bedrooms were ice cold in the winter), and to get hot water for washing dishes, clothes or ourselves, we had to heat big pots of water on the stove. The bathtub was also in the kitchen, disguised under a hinged wooden board that doubled as a seating area next to the kitchen table. One time someone knocked on the kitchen door when I happened to be taking a bath and my mother opened the door, not realizing I was still in the tub. I sank as low as I could and pulled the cover down to an almost closed position, hoping whoever the caller was wouldn’t come into the kitchen and try to sit on it. (Luckily, it was just the Fuller Brush man and my mom wasn’t buying anything that day.) I can think of lots of things that are better today than they were in the old days, but there is one thing I have to admit was a little better: I was younger then.