Curmudgeon mode ON:
Fourth of July has only now gone, and just today we got a doorhanger ad about a back-to-school sale at Sears. But is that such a bad thing? Why, kids today ought to be grateful we let ‘em out of school at all. Back in my day we went to school eight hours a day, from September 1 through June 30, most of the time in heavy snowdrifts so deep as to make a Saint Bernard reconsider its calling. At night we had to listen to the wind howling through the slats in the attic while we rubbed Granny's feet by a sputtering coal fire.
And then in the summer we had to chop cotton, string chili peppers, top tobacco, harvest corn, slop the hogs, bore out the cows' teats, and fix breakfast for the farmhands, all before 4 AM. And then maybe, maybe once or twice our parents would let us go to the swimmin’ hole for an afternoon, but even then it wasn’t fun. The place was deep and muddy and warm and we always lost two or three kids each summer to the monster catfish that came up from the bottom, jaws agape. These young’uns today just don’t know how sweet they have it. Kids today, is all...
Curmudgeon mode OFF
None of the foregoing is true, by the way. Artistic license, you understand...
Fourth of July has only now gone, and just today we got a doorhanger ad about a back-to-school sale at Sears. But is that such a bad thing? Why, kids today ought to be grateful we let ‘em out of school at all. Back in my day we went to school eight hours a day, from September 1 through June 30, most of the time in heavy snowdrifts so deep as to make a Saint Bernard reconsider its calling. At night we had to listen to the wind howling through the slats in the attic while we rubbed Granny's feet by a sputtering coal fire.
And then in the summer we had to chop cotton, string chili peppers, top tobacco, harvest corn, slop the hogs, bore out the cows' teats, and fix breakfast for the farmhands, all before 4 AM. And then maybe, maybe once or twice our parents would let us go to the swimmin’ hole for an afternoon, but even then it wasn’t fun. The place was deep and muddy and warm and we always lost two or three kids each summer to the monster catfish that came up from the bottom, jaws agape. These young’uns today just don’t know how sweet they have it. Kids today, is all...
Curmudgeon mode OFF
None of the foregoing is true, by the way. Artistic license, you understand...