We were poor. I don't mean the kind of poor where my mother had us on the corner asking strangers to "gimme some money". We just accepted what was given to us. My mother raised all seven us alone and never once did I see her sitting around feeling sorry for herself. She took it one day at a time. A few times the electricity was turned off, due to non payment of the bill, we didn't sit around crying, we would light candles and make shadow figures on the wall or play other games. I repeat, we were poor. I'll never forget the time there was a  canned food drive at school to feed the needy. This around Christmas. All the kids brought in canned food. I checked our kitchen and found an old dented can of some type of vegetable and took it to school.  A few weeks later some people came to our house and presented my mother with a bag of food. As my mother was taking the food out of the bag I swear one of those cans looked exactly like that dented can I had previously taken to school.

I loved going to school.  This was the one place that all my friends and I could get together and learn or cause mischief. One thing I can say regarding the teachers back in those days - they wanted us to learn.  In teaching us to want to learn, some of us developed skills to want to learn more. A basic skill was to go to the library. The one place you could go to and find books to read and not have to pay for them. As I've said before, we were poor, not stupid.  I was maybe around seven, coming home from school one day, and I passed my great grandmother's house. Like she did everyday she was sitting on her porch watching the kids go by. Sometimes the kids would show her their report cards and she would give them cookies, other times if she saw some of them acting up she would swat them with a switch. This particular day I was walking near her house and she called me to come up on the porch. When I got to the porch she swatted me with her switch and told me she never wanted to see me walking with my head down. To this day I keep my head up.

After years of apartment living my mother finally bought a house. What's really interesting about the house is it had four bedrooms, two baths and a nice back yard. This purchase was made after all of us kids were grown. The only people living in the house right after it was purchased, were my mother, her husband (my step father) and my youngest brother. The reason I bring this up now is because when we were small children, I can remember living in a one bedroom apartment. My mother had the type of bed that was built into the wall, which was in the living room. The four boys had bunkbeds in the dining room, and the three girls had bunkbeds in the bedroom. There was one bathroom and the backyard was a vacant lot. I wonder to this day if life would have been different if we had been raised in the four bedroom house.

Yeah, those good ole' days, when you played all day outside, jumping rope, hopscotch, jacks, hide and seek and sometimes just sitting around pulling up a blade of grass and chewing on it. Can you imagine trying to chew on a blade of grass today?