"Hey Dad," one of my kids asked the other day,
"What was your favorite fast food when you were
growing up?"
"We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,"
I informed him. "All the food was slow."
"C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?"
"It was a place called 'at home,'" I explained.
"Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa got
home from work, we sat down together at the
dining room table, and if I didn't like what
she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there
until I did like it."
By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was
afraid he was going to suffer serious internal
damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how
I had to have permission to leave the table. But
here are some other things I would have told him
about my childhood if I figured his system could
have handled it:
Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis,
set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country
or had a credit card. In their later years they had
something called a revolving charge card. The card
was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears
AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore.
Maybe he died.
My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This
was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I
had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and
only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a
television in our house until I was 11, but my
grandparents had one before that. It was, of course,
black and white, but they bought a piece of colored
plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue,
like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like
grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for
programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across
someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens
taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look
larger.
I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called
"pizza pie." When I bit into it, I burned the roof of
my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered
itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still
the best pizza I ever had.
We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the
only car in our family was my grandfather's Ford. He
called it a "machine."
I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone
in the house was in the living room and it was on a
party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen
and make sure some people you didn't know weren't
already using the line.
Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.
All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys
delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six
days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I
got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every
morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents
from my customers. My favorite customers were the
ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the
change. My least favorite customers were the ones
who seemed to never be home on collection day.
Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least,
they did in the movies. Touching someone else's
tongue with yours was called French kissing and
they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what
they did in French movies. French movies were
dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.
If you grew up in a generation before there was
fast food, you may want to share some of these
memories with your children or grandchildren.
Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.
Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?
