WEEKEND FILLER

Someone asked the other day, “What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?”

“We didn’t have 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. “Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like 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.

Here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

My parents never drove me to school. I had a bicycle that had one speed: slow. If it was too cold or snowy, I walked.

We didn’t have a television in our house until I was 10. It was black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem. It came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually locally produced news to begin the day.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen to make sure people weren’t already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home… but milk was.