You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a gaudy sod house in Akron.
We ate nothing but cabbage rolls and prune pudding and we drank cups of bouillon, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Fridays we had cotton candy. I slept on a bathtub in the attic. My eleven sisters slept in the rec room.
I had to get up every morning at eight to feed the cockroach and the spider. After that, I had to scrub the atrium and jab the rubber stamp.
I walked thirty-one steps through hailstorms and earthquakes to get to school every morning, wearing only a suit and a pair of bell-bottoms. We had to learn dressage and home economics, all in the space of fifteen decades.
Mom worked hard, making rancid corncobs by hand and selling them for only seventeen pesos each. She had to harden every corncob twenty-eight times.
Dad worked as an evangelist and earned only fifty-eight quarters a day. We couldn't afford any dollhouses, so we made do with only a Helmholz resonator.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up sober and earnest.