An Irish priest was transferred to Texas .  Father O’Malley rose from his bed one morning to find it was a fine spring day in his new Texas mission parish.

He walked to the window of his bedroom to get a deep breath of the beautiful day outside.

He then noticed there was a jackass lying dead in the middle of his front lawn.  He promptly called the local police station…….

The conversation went like this:  ”Good morning. This is Sergeant Jones. How might I help you?”

”And the best of the day te yerself.  This is Father O’Malley at St. Ann ‘s Catholic Church..There’s a jackass lying dead on me front lawn.

Sergeant Jones, considering himself to be quite a wit, replied with a smirk, ”Well now Father, it was always my impression that you people took care of the last rites!”

There was dead silence on the line for a long moment………………………….

Father O’Malley then replied: ”Aye, ’tis certainly true; but we are also obliged to notify the next of kin.”

“The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.” – Al McGuire

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” – Ambrose Bierce

“It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads.” – Andy Borowitz

“At every party there are two kinds of people – those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.” – Ann Landers 

“Have you noticed that all the people in favour of birth control are already born?” – Benny Hill 

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” – Bill Watterson   

“My favourite machine at the gym is the vending machine.” – Caroline Rhea

“All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height.” – Casey Stengel

“Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.” – Dave Barry 

“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” – Edward Abbey 

“How many people here have telekinetic powers? Raise my hand.” – Emo Philips 

“If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.” – George Burns

“Too Many birthdays is a major cause of death” – Yogi Berra

And my favorite

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein

Doctor on TV recently (Norman Swan on ABC) telling us that we needed children to play in the dirt with their dogs and cats and be  allowed to build up some immunity!  Well bugger me!  Who would have thought?

Gosh, those were the days. 

Mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs, and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach.  For some strange reason we  didn’t seem to get food poisoning.  Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag and not in ice pack cooler.  For the life of me I can’t ever remember getting E.coli. 

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the creek, the lake or at the beach.  Pristine chlorinated pools were at the YMCA. 

We had no idea of beach closures in those days. 

Everyone all took Physical Education.  We risked permanent injury with a pair of regular running shoes.  Cross-training athletic shoes had not been invented. 

I can’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. 

We got the strap for doing something wrong at school.  They used to call it discipline, yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than us. 

We had at least 40 kids in our class and somehow, we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter.  FUNNY EH! 

We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion and sang the national anthem.  No one got upset.  Staying in detention after school netted us all sorts of negative attention, we wish we hadn’t got. 

And we all knew we had to accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of ourselves.  Sometimes we played on losing teams.  We learned about winning and losing. 

I just can’t recall being bored.  We were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.  We used to swim naked in the creek and dive into the water by climbing trees. 

Oh yeah … And where were the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting?  Gawd, I could have been killed! 

We played “King of the Castle” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the trusty bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked.  Today it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. 

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.  How could we possibly have known that? 

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes.  We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! 

How did we ever survive? 

HERE IS TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T.  I’M SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.  I WOULD NOT TRADE MY GROWING UP YEARS FOR ANYTHING!