Fast food
Posted by: lvdug <lvdug@...>
"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, never 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, and ice.
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 4:00
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 never seemed to 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.
=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=`=
LaVonne *:D
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