Fast Food Nation

'Hey Dad,' one of my kids 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 'at home,'' I explained.
'Grandma cooked every day and then, 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. But here are some other things I
would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have
handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis , set foot on a
golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their
later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good
only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there
is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly
because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50
pounds, and only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a television in our house
until I was 9, but my sister and her husband had one before that. It was, of
course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The
top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass.
The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire
trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens
taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 17 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called 'pizza
pie.' When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese
slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too.
It's still the best pizza I ever had.

We didn't have a car until I was 9. Before that, the only car in
our family was my uncle's Chevy. He called it a 'machine.'

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was
in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you
had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already
using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. All newspapers were delivered.
Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the
movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French
kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in
French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.