"Hey, Grandma", one of my grandchildren asked the other day, "What was your favorite fast food when you were a youngster?"
"We did not have fast food when I was your age," was my reply. "All food was slow cooked."
"Aw, come on, seriously. Where did you eat?"
"It was a place called 'at home'. My mother, your Great Grandma, cooked every day. When Great Grandpa arrived home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table. If I did not like what was served, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it", was my reply.
By this time, the grandchild was laughing so hard, I was afraid she was going to suffer serious internal damage. I thought it would be a good idea not to mention the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.
But here are some other things I would have told her about my childhood, if I figured her system could have handled it:
Some parents never owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card good only at Sears and Roebuck. 'Course there is no Roebuck anymore.
My parents never drove me to soccer practice....because we never heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds and only had one speed....SLOW. We did not have television in our house until I was 11. However, my grandparents had a television...black and while with a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, the bottom third was green and the middle was red. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the set to make the picture look larger.
I was a teenage before I tasted my first pizza which was called "pizza pie". We did not have a car until I was 15. We used my Grandfather's 1941 Dodge which he called a "machine".
The only phone in the house was in the living room....not in my bedroom and it was on a party line. We always had to listen before dialing to make sure no one was already using the line.
Milk was delivered to our home, not pizza. Newspapers were delivered by boys six days a week. The paper cost 7 cents. The newspaper boy kept 2 cents. Saturday was collection day...42 cents. Lucky was the boy whose customer gave him 50 cents and was told to keep the change.
"Grandma, what is this", she asked as she handed me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle whose top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it, "a big salt shaker"? I knew immediately what it was. The bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we did not have steam irons.
We grew up with head lights dimmer switches on the floor board of the car, ignition switches on the dashboard, hand signals for turning signals when driving a car, pant leg clips for bicyles without chain guards, real ice boxes, blue flashbulbs, wash tub wringers, metal ice trays with levers and home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
So, did we grow up under austerity and deprivation and, if so, why did we turn out to be such solid citizens? Or, is there a lesson about simplicity in all of this....sort of a "less is more" lesson? Do we really need refrigerators with stainless steel doors? And do we really need 4WD road beasts that weigh a ton and get 12 mpg on their way to church and the grocery store? Maybe it is time to count our blessings, take stock of what we have and think about how we might share some of it.