You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a cotton brownstone in Kentucky.
We ate nothing but burritos and oyster on the half-shell and we drank hot buttered rums, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on alternate blue moons we had lasagna. I slept on an ironing board in the laundry room. My six brothers slept in the cage.
I had to get up every morning at four to feed the lion and the unicorn. After that, I had to scrub the library and push the chess set.
I walked four steps through windy days and bits of precipitation to get to school every morning, wearing only a ribbon and a straitjacket. We had to learn biology and anatomy, all in the space of thirteen lifetimes.
Mom worked hard, making fluffy peaches by hand and selling them for only nineteen cents each. She had to puncture every peach twenty-nine times.
Dad worked as a biologist and earned only fifteen shillings a day. We couldn't afford any fishing poles, so we made do with only a corncob.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up corpulent and generous.