Subject: RE: BS: I am boycotting the MJ obit thread
From:
Rapparee
Date: 02 Jul 09 - 09:20 AM
The oldest of four, my father died before I was conceived and my mother never remarried or even messed around. This made the births of my brothers and sister difficult, but my mother always managed somehow. She knew that I would need siblings and so gave birth to them.
We were poor, but so was everyone in our neighborhood. As a result, we kids learned to save and to make a penny go a long, long way. I remember that we saved bottle caps, washers, half-burned bags of doggy doo that our friends put on our porch as a joke (we used the bags to take our lunch to school), hubcaps, drowning puppies, the passengers of sinking ships, and sundry other things. There was always fun things to do, however, since my father had erected a gallows in the backyard before he died -- we used it for a swing set and eventually we all learned parachute landing falls by falling through the trapdoor. This familiarity with the gallows eventually saved the lives of my two brothers after they had a minor brush with the law -- of course, they were innocent and they have since gone on to raise innocent families of their own.
Sometimes we could help Mom out and bring in money for the household expenses, few though they were. I remember one time when my youngest brother won a foot race and came in at odds of 300,000 to 1, mostly because at that time he only had one leg and that was on backwards (he finally got the hang of using a zipper). Of course we didn't have any money to bet, so we bet nothing and won big. THAT really helped out with the bills!
Every morning we had to fix our own breakfast, growing, harvesting, threshing, and milling the oats for the gruel before we'd head off to school. When I tell of this everyone says, "...and it was uphill bother ways!" but that's not true and I'd be lying if I said that was the case. No, it was downhill both ways, a 270 degree slope into a crevasse that plunged into what seemed to be the middle of the Earth. In fact, we used the bubbling magma to heat our little mugs of watersoup, our sole luncheon item.
Once, while were enjoying our spartan lunch, some grown-ups came and asked us questions. All three of them were wearing red tights and had horns and tails, but since they carried pitchforks we knew they were just local farmers so we weren't afraid. They asked us about what they for some reason called "the upper world" and we answered with so much evident love for each other that the biggest said to the others, "Well, if they're all like these kids we'll never make any headway around here. Let's see about Washington, Ottawa, London, and other more productive places" and they left, leaving only a smell like burnt matches (with which we played, burnt matches being the only toys were had aside from the gallows).
Anyway, that's a little bit of my youth and I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I'll tell you more sometime, if you'd like.
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sj
