Pickles by Brian Crane for September 09, 2021

Not a serious problem. Just drink it from the bowl.

And it was uphill both ways.

This is why you need to practice your tongue exercises; so you can slurp your soup better.

Well, when I was a kid, we were so poor that we had to share the same BATHTUB. And heaven help the one who had to bathe after my two little brothers, who loved to play in the mud downstream from the barn.

Not really. Though, mom DID sometimes re-use bath water for more than one of us. Never occurred to any of us, so far as I know, that it was a problem. And by the time we could be trusted to more or less clean ourselves, we had graduated to showers anyway.

We had plenty of “silver”-ware. None of it matched and much of it was stamped “U.S.N”.

yeah, the Great Depression was quite, well, depressing

So if you got the knife, you were forked ?

What a liar! Why men has this inclination to take advantage of kids’ naivete, like Calvin’s dad?

Fork is not much good with a soup either!

… and you wouldn’t want to ear about my four grandparents denture…

We use the plastic “silverware” we get at restaurants.

None of my silverware match. I used to get it at the Acme while shopping never realizing each was a different style!

Earl was it three stooges soup with hot water poured through a chicken ?

And he had to walk to school. Uphill both ways.

That’s right, we’re lookin’ at you, Earl!

‘’Oh, you had silverware. You were lucky. We had to use a flat piece of wood.’’

I eat my peas with honey; I’ve done it all my life.

They do taste kind of funny, but it keeps them on my knife.

My father who was one of nine kids said they were so poor their mother used to put a pot of food on a chair in the middle of the room and dinner was walking around the chair and sniffing.

That’s the most RIDICULOUS thing I’ve ever heard.!!

….so did ya pick up the bowl and slurp it down?

I feel like Earl is looking at me.

What’s a knife?

My dad had one Army spoon.

When I first got married we had one fork, one spoon and one knife. One of us got the fork, one the spoon, and we shared the knife. If we had soup we drank it. We had one bath towel, it was Phoenix so one could take a shower and in a half hour it’d be dry so the other could take one.

Oh, he meant one setting, not one set.

I think Nelson knows his grandpa is full of baloney.

Good one, Earl. But on soup day, the fork would be just as useless as the knife.

You spend your life trying to make it better for yourself and family and then spend all that time complaining/bragging how difficult it was instead of enjoying the fruits of your labours.

Mom had two sets: the Good Set for special occasions and the everyday use set that had many different different patterns. I still use some of those along with my everyday set.

Just pick up the bowl and drink it.

We always fought over who got the “sharp” knife because Mom had a (not so) rare talent for turning meat into leather, or worse, hockey pucks.

You mean you had something beside stone soup on some days? Admit it, Earl, your family was one of the 1%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

Reminds me of a childhood ditty— I eat my peas with honey, I’ve done it all my life. It may seem kinda funny, but it keeps them on the knife.

I also, by way of my late Mother-in-law, have ten sterling, shrimp cocktail forks, they will come in handy someday when I have nine people over for a shrimp cocktail party.

I had to eat soup sandwiches on occasion.

Ben…how did you eat soup with a fork?