Property listed with Southampton Meadows.

Long-time brokers remember the old days - always remembered as the good old days - real estate was about selling, cyberspace was not the place to be, no Realogy and giant corporates doing commission alterations; paperwork was customer cards and listing sheets, you didn't need a Mapquest to get there, nor an hour in a sea of cars to get customers from Southampton to East Hampton, and, those who sold were from here - not elsewhere.

So we are walking further down Memory Lane this column - found off Main Street somewhere - a nostalgia column for the over 40s, courtesy of a circulating email passed along by a very top local real estate mind, an unmatched people manager, a visionary moneymaker, Melanie Ross, who still lives in the same real estate she did when she first married Mike, a house painter par excellence.

It has to count, therefore, as a real estate column. A Lane, after all, is real estate. And Memory Lane is much traveled by all, yet sans suffocating traffic. So here we go:

Pull a chair up to the TV set, spread the rabbit ears as far as they go, TV shows in black and white you could hardly see for all the snow: "The Honeymooners," "Superman," "Gomer Pyle," "Our Gang," "The Mouseketeers," "The Lone Ranger" – 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter, and we used to eat it raw sometimes, too. School sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but we can't remember getting E-coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake, the bay, the ocean, instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE, and risked permanent injury with a pair of high-top Keds (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built-in light reflectors. We can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option - even for stupid kids! Guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

We thought that we were supposed to accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of ourselves.

We just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah, and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when we got that bee sting? We could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

We recall Buddy Jones from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amok.

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 needed to get into group therapy and 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?

Trips to Memory Lane? See "The Gods Must Be Crazy" a wonderful film that shows how uncivilized and insanely complicated our civilized artificially imposed structure on life is. East End real estate? It used to be simple, but now it is a very strange business.