When I Was a Kid
by Robert G. Lee

My father loved to tell those "I-had-it-so-rough- growing-up" stories. And I'm not talking about that "I-had-to-walk-ten-miles-through-snow" story. No, that was for amateurs. My dad was raised in the Great Depression. He had to carry ice on his back and sell it door-to-door in the dead of winter. He made five cents a year and gladly shared it with the other twenty families living together in a one-bathroom house. And once a week they would go out and help people less fortunate than themselves, which to my mind were lepers and dead people. I couldn't figure out who could be less fortunate than my father's family.

He had a story for everything. If I complained about my homework, I got this one: "When I was a boy, we couldn't afford books. I had to go to the library and copy the entire encyclopedia by hand. But we couldn't afford paper either, so I had to scratch it on the back of a sheet of ice and run it home before it melted."

This gives me so much to live up to with my own kids. The only story I can tell them is that I never had a VCR when I was growing up.