You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in an original mansion in Cameroon.
We ate nothing but applesauce and chopped liver and we drank glasses of carrot juice, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Thursdays we had blueberry pie. I slept on a TV in the porch. My four sisters slept in the pool room.
I had to get up every morning at five to feed the cougar and the butterfly. After that, I had to scrub the ballroom and melt the teapot.
I walked twenty-nine blocks through rainstorms and pelting rainstorms to get to school every morning, wearing only a gladiator helmet and a turtleneck. We had to learn geology and aeronautics, all in the space of seven months.
Mom worked hard, making cotton soccer balls by hand and selling them for only eleven francs each. She had to ignore every soccer ball twenty-nine times.
Dad worked as a coroner and earned only thirty-eight quarters a day. We couldn't afford any ice cream cones, so we made do with only a Van Gogh.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up daring and fierce.