And I, being only 21, can still tell very similar things about my childhood in
Poland!
We definitely ate at home, all the time. Or in the school "cafeteria". I was
picky, so I often ended up sitting there for an hour or two not eating my food
before they let me get up.
We lived in a flat. Only one family on our floor had a phone, so we all used
theirs - even better than a party line, huh? <g>. My grandparents did have a
party line phone - I think it was actually for the whole village. Also, you
didn't dial at all, you just lifted the speaker part and told the phone person
who you wanted to talk to. Also, there was a little handle on the side of the
phone, which you had to turn to make it work - I don't remember whether you had
to do it all the time or just at the beginning, but I remember it being an
important part of the process <g>.
Once, my father and his friend decided to get a TV *and* a video casette player.
They couldn't afford to get both, so they both rotated between our houses every
month. The TV was, of course, very small and black-and-white, although as a
child I swore I saw colors on it, and when we finally got a color TV much later,
I was very disappointed, because the colors were all wrong <g>.
It was hard to get basic food products. I remember once standing in line for
rice. The line went out of the store, down the stairs, and about the length of
the block. Me and mom switched places so that one of us would stand in the line
and the other could go sit down for a while, since it took hours. The guy right
before me in the line bought the last two bags of rice.
And once, when Dad came back home on a break in his mandatory army training, he
brought home ORANGES!
We had lots of power outages and similar stuff. Sometimes all at once. Once,
in the middle of winter, the power and the gas (i.e. the stuff that worked your
stove) went out all at once. And since power was needed to pump water up to the
flat, no water either. For about a week. Me and my dad had to go to the well
every day to get water. I was probably about 10 years old, the buckets were
heavy, so I always spilled some and it froze on my clothing before we got home.
Being a kid, I actually thought it was a lot of fun. I called it "The Ice Age"
<g>.
So, apparently, I'm also "Older 'n Dirt"! And I bet if I told those stories to
Polish kids 8 or 10 years younger, they'd have just as hard a time believing
it...
Weronika
On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 06:18:38PM +0100, Jean Nathan wrote:
> This was sent to DH. Change the currency and some of the words, and you
> could be in the UK apart from the revolving charge card. My parents belonged
> to various shop's clubs - paid in a bit each week until there was enough
> money on the card to pay for a pair of shoes or whatever the shop sold.
>
>
>
> I am Older 'n Dirt!!
--
Weronika Patena
Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
http://vole.stanford.edu/weronika
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