Boy Am I Old! by Paul Victor [Reprinted from L.A. Mentary, newsletter of Greater Los Angeles Area Mensa, January, 2004; Arvin Tseng, Editor]

One of my grandchildren asked me the other day, "What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up in Germany?" "There was no fast food when I was growing up," I informed him. "All the food was slow." "C’mon, seriously. Where did you eat?" "It was a place called ‘home’," I explained. "My mother cooked every day and when we got home, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she had cooked I was allowed to sit there until I liked it."

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn’t tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. But here are some other things I would have told him about my early childhood, if I had figured that his system could have handled it:

Most parents did not own their house, wore only Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never traveled out of the country and there were no credit cards. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. But that card was good only at Sears Roebuck. There is no Roebuck anymore. I think he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. We didn’t have a television in our house because… it had not yet been invented. All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I did too, six days a week. It cost 7 German pennies, of which I got to keep 2. I had to get up at 4 am every day. I also had to collect the money from the customers. I liked those customers best who told me to keep the change.

In my grandfather’s days all there were was horses and carriages. He too had those. He knew how to get the horse to walk, but he had a problem steering it. A neighbor once asked him "Where are you going, Simon?" And he answered, "Ask the horse!" When my dad cleaned out my grandmother’s house (after she had died) he brought me an old bottle with a bunch of holes in the top. I thought someone had tried to make a salt shaker out of it. But it actually was the bottle that would sit on the end of an ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because there were no steam irons yet.

Boy, am I old!