I'm not writing this wanting you to feel sorry for me...you might of had the same experiences This a hit to the heart. When one grows up poor one often times think you are the only one and not as good as other people..You feel ashamed. These are my thoughts...the essay sent by a friend tells it all.
Yes, us 7 kids had ketchup sandwiches all the time...or bread dipped in vinegar. My father grew a lot of potatoes for us kids along with the venison and rabbits we ate. My mother cooked spaghetti...sometimes no sauce...polenta too. Fried corn meal....hardly ever had breakfast
We never had hot running water in the house. My mother would heat it in the boiler on the wood stove where she baked bread sometimes. Put a tub in the middle of the floor and we got our baths that way. Us kids would take the dough and fry it ...fry bread...like the native Americans did.
No furnace...just a pot belly cook and wood stove. When I got older I would go with my dad, walk the tracks and put coal that fell from the trains in sacks and bring them home for heat.
I still donate to the Salvation Army. In the upper peninsula of Michigan it got below zero a lot. They would drop off wool navy and army coats...powdered milk...and sometimes blocks of cheese. (I still grab an old wool coat and throw over the blanket, just to remind of what it was like to be cold and being able to see my breath)
Not sure we would not have starved if not for school lunches...the cooks knew and gave us extra helpings. I remember I could hardly wait for the lunch bell to ring. Hard to study when one is hungry.
Somehow we survived...but the few photos we have left make us kids look pretty close to holocaust victims in Nazi concentration camps.
Being poor is not fun...Like Sean Connery once said in an interview...he grew up poor. "I never want to be poor again, and sometimes even worry about it today even if I have a good life now." It is hard to comprehend unless you were.
Joe
This is a powerful, moving essay ...
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