The good old days?                                       

             “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” That quaint quote, erroneously attributed to Yogi Berra, popped into my mind when I received an e-mail message congratulating survivors of the 30s, 40s and 50s. The sender pointed out that we made it this far although our mothers smoked and drank while we were in the womb.

            We managed to qualify for Medicare in spite of being tucked into cribs covered with lead-based paints and playing with aspirin bottles without child-proof caps. We survived anyway. It was a thrill to ride along a bumpy country road in the back of a pickup truck. Cupcakes and soda were a regular part of our diet.

            We survived. That is, most of us did. The authors of that e-mail message were kids when those seemingly harmless activities took place and are unaware of what the good old days were really like.

            Not as many mothers-to-be drink and smoke these days. Most of them are aware that drinking alcohol during pregnancy could lead to brain damage of the fetus. Smoking during pregnancy can result in low-birth-weight babies who are at risk of osteoporosis when they reach late middle age. Having watched the tragedy of blindness and brain damage from lead paint, my memories of the “old days” are not so good. Aspirin and iron poisoning dropped dramatically when the manufacturers of those products made it hard for children to open the bottles. A pediatric colleague who worked in a rural area told me that head injuries among kids who bounced out of pickup trucks were a leading cause of death in his practice.

            We’re finally realizing that cupcakes and soda are largely responsible for the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes among children.

            On the positive side, we played outdoors until it got dark. We climbed trees and sometimes fell out of them but broken arms heal quickly in kids and are stronger at the fracture site. An occasional chipped tooth was sometimes the price of an afternoon of tackle football without a face mask or hockey without a mouth guard. Dodge ball and tag were a normal part of recess. We walked to most of our friends’ houses and rode our bikes to the rest and never asked Mom for a ride, mainly because Dad had the only car and he was at work.

            Bring back the good old days, but not all of them.