The mother in the checkout lane carefully guided each of her three children to use the hand sanitizer before helping unload the groceries. Something inside me rebelled.
It wasn’t like this when I was a kid. The only thing my mother insisted on was that we wash up before supper, after going to the bathroom, and line up for fingernail and behind the ears inspection before going to bed. Other than that, Mom figured whatever dirt we accumulated during the day wouldn’t hurt us as long as it was washed off at the end of the day.
My grandfather’s favorite mantra was, “What doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger.” He would know. The man was a woodworker, a metal smith, a grease monkey, a mechanic and a gardener – often all in the same day. And the only time he washed his hands was just before supper. He lived to be 96 and I don’t remember him ever being sick.
As kids, we played in the yard rain or shine, built things from mud, goop, sticks, stones and various unidentified substances. We carried frogs in our pockets, bugs in our hands, and dug graves for dead caterpillars with our fingernails. Then we washed up for supper. Decades later most of us are still healthy.
I worry about overprotected kids. The dirt we played in every day was loaded with more germs than a biologist could identify in a lifetime. But we survived, probably because exposure to those grimy things helped us build resistance to the diseases they spawned. I have to wonder if today’s children may be sitting ducks for the first thing they run into without a hand sanitizer.
I recently heard someone suggest we wash our hands for as long as it takes to sing the Happy Birthday song three times.
I do that every day. But only before supper.
