You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a rough closet in Yakima.
We ate nothing but dirty rice and country glazed ham and we drank old fashioneds, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Sundays we had chocolate-covered ants. I slept on a bookcase in the patio. My ten sisters slept in the attic.
I had to get up every morning at eleven to feed the salamander and the rhinoceros. After that, I had to scrub the boiler room and inflate the corsage.
I walked thirty-two kilometers through rainbows and dust storms to get to school every morning, wearing only a tunic and a pair of nylons. We had to learn addition and French, all in the space of two blinks of an eye.
Mom worked hard, making crooked tissues by hand and selling them for only nineteen crowns each. She had to strengthen every tissue seventeen times.
Dad worked as a principal and earned only seventy-one half-dollars a day. We couldn't afford any crackers, so we made do with only a feather duster.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up bubbly and corpulent.