We Drank From the Hose and Somehow Lived

Kids today have filtered water bottles that cost more than my first toolbox.  We had a garden hose.  Not a fancy hose.  Not one with a filter.  The green one that had been laying in the yard since Easter.

You'd turn it on.  Wait ten seconds for the water to stop tasting like molten rubber.  Take a drink.  Go back to playing.  Nobody panicked. Nobody asked if it was BPA-free. Nobody checked the pH balance.

You were just thirsty. That was good enough.  Our parents had one rule.

"When the streetlights come on, get your ass home."  That was it!

No Life360. No Find My iPhone. No hourly check-ins.  Just a bicycle, a neighborhood full of kids, and enough bad decisions to keep life interesting.  You left the house after breakfast. Your mom had absolutely no idea where you were.  And somehow...

She wasn't worried.

Because every kid in the neighborhood had another mom keeping half an eye on things.  If you screwed up, your parents usually found out before you got home.  And somehow, we survived.  We got scraped up. We broke bones. We learned lessons. We figured things out.

Nobody handed us a participation trophy because we wiped out on our BMX. They handed us a Band-Aid and told us not to do it again.  Looking back, maybe that's why our generation has such a twisted sense of humor.

Life wasn't perfect. Neither were we. We learned to laugh at ourselves because nobody else was going to do it for us.

That's exactly why Salty Grit exists.

Not because we want to go backward.  Because we miss when people could laugh, bust each other's chops, and not take every little thing so damn personally.  We'll keep the smartphones. We'll keep air conditioning. We'll even keep GPS because nobody misses folding paper maps.

But we're hanging on to sarcasm. Nobody's taking that away.

Gritty Tip of the Week

You don't need to win every argument. Sometimes it's enough to know you survived drinking from a garden hose and you're still standing.

The Grit Fix

Some people wear shirts with motivational quotes. We'd rather wear one that gets a laugh from the guy across the parking lot because he remembers drinking from the hose too. That's our kind of people.

Final Flip

Maybe we weren't raised in simpler times.  Maybe we were just raised to be tougher.

Either way...  We turned out just salty enough.

Cheers, bitches. 🍺

🍺 What's Got You Salty?

What's one thing from growing up that kids today would never understand?

The best answer might inspire our next shirt.