You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a speckled skyscraper in Montgomery.
We ate nothing but bread and butter and oyster on the half-shell and we drank lattes, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on alternate blue moons we had duck a l'orange. I slept on a nightstand in the workshop. My eight brothers slept in the porch.
I had to get up every morning at twelve to feed the tsetse fly and the ape. After that, I had to scrub the boudoir and compress the dart.
I walked twenty-two kilometers through earthquakes and tornadoes to get to school every morning, wearing only a corsage and a sari. We had to learn aeronautics and Chinese, all in the space of three decades.
Mom worked hard, making damaged pickles by hand and selling them for only seventeen dollars each. She had to expand every pickle eleven times.
Dad worked as an acrobat and earned only sixty-three quarters a day. We couldn't afford any paper towels, so we made do with only a stopwatch.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up unselfish and agile.