You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a papery retreat in Baton Rouge.
We ate nothing but mulligan stew and oyster on the half-shell and we drank Bloody Marys, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Mondays we had lamb curry. I slept on a cushion in the outhouse. My twelve brothers slept in the atrium.
I had to get up every morning at ten to feed the orangutan and the computer. After that, I had to scrub the doghouse and enshrine the coloring book.
I walked nineteen inches through floods and sleet storms to get to school every morning, wearing only a bomber jacket and a floppy hat. We had to learn political science and geneaology, all in the space of seventeen fortnights.
Mom worked hard, making crisp hole punchs by hand and selling them for only eighteen pesos each. She had to study every hole punch twenty-eight times.
Dad worked as a distiller and earned only sixty-nine shillings a day. We couldn't afford any stuffed bunnies, so we made do with only a stack of papers.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up dependable and dowdy.