Eating

If you haven't guessed from previous writings here, we were poor. We were not destitute, we were the kind of poor where you make $100 a year too much, so you can't get food stamps or AFDC. Practically every meal was home cooked, and dinner fell into 3 basic categories- 1/2 lb hamburger with noodles, Rice a Roni stuffed into green peppers, and Totino's party pizza. We had Totino's once a week. We could buy 2 pizzas for a dollar, and we would each get 2/3's of a pizza. Mom always picked the smallest, plainest slices. She would carefully pick the pepperoni cubes off of her slices, and make 2 equal piles for us. There were quite a few nights where she would say she wasn't hungry, and she wouldn't eat at all. We would try really hard on those nights to not be hungry also, so that she could have some left over. We would eat very slowly, and exclaim loudly about how good it was. We'd ask her over and over, "Are you sure you're not hungry?" Then the plates would be clean, and there was no food left for mom.

As we got older, and roamed farther from home, we learned ways to fill our bellies before dinner time. The walk to the grocery store took us past a mulberry tree, so we would stop stuff our mouths with berries -run to the store -run back to the tree, and stuff ourselves again. In a pinch, grass makes a good filler. Yes, I ate grass. I ate bark and leaves and orange peels too. A little bit of bitter goes a long way toward supressing an appetite.
During summer vacation, we could always bum some crackers off our friends. We learned how to make Halloween candy last 'til Christmas. Christmas candy can stretch to Valentine's Day, and those chalk-like conversation hearts could float us through Easter.

Where did her $120 a week go, you ask? Well, taxes knocks it down to about $95. There were bills and rent to pay, and our tuition for Catholic School was almost two thousand dollars. (mom got a grant to help pay for it) Plus, there were foods my Mom refused to do without. We always had milk, provided we drank no more than 3 cups a day. We always had whatever fruit was in season. We had meat 4 times a week -if you count those pepperoni cubes on the Totino's pizzas, and once a month or so, Mom would buy cheese. So, we weren't starving, by any means. We were just very hungry.