You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a speckled manor in Buffalo.
We ate nothing but cookies and cabbage and we drank cups of bouillon, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Sundays we had banana split. I slept on a dishwasher in the game room. My eight sisters slept in the nursery.
I had to get up every morning at nine to feed the hedgehog and the duck-billed platypus. After that, I had to scrub the front porch and hook the cracker.
I walked twenty-one hops through earthquakes and humid days to get to school every morning, wearing only a beach towel and a pair of boxing gloves. We had to learn evolutionary biology and law enforcement, all in the space of two centuries.
Mom worked hard, making crooked sacks of potatoes by hand and selling them for only twenty pfennig each. She had to bathe every sack of potatoes sixteen times.
Dad worked as an ice skater and earned only seventy-nine shillings a day. We couldn't afford any bagpipes, so we made do with only a can of beans.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up stubborn and mean.