"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.  "At their Hutchins Lake Home, Grandma Sheckler cooked every day and when Grandpa Sheckler got home from work, we sat down together at the back porch table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it."

Milk delivered to our home, in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.

By this time, Bryan 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:

We didn't have a car until I was 13, When Mom remarried to Red Hutchins, he had a plymouth. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandpa Sheckler's Ford. He called it a "machine." At work he drove a big truck for the county, a road grader in the summer and snow plow in the winter.

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 11, but Grandpa Sheckler 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 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. It was a dial type, but you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the  line. Most smalls towns around us still had the crank phone.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every morning. On
 Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change, Like Mrs.Crane. But 1st her neighbor, Mrs. Rasmussen gave me a slice of fresh baked bread. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

We went to a lot of movies. Most were at the OUR theater in town but sometimes we drove to an Allegan or Holland theater. I also remember seeing a hypnotist in the Allegan theater. Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies, (like how could we tell?). 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.

I also remember mom having a pop bottle that had a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. It wasthe bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we didn't have steam irons.

I was 18, on my Senior Class trip to Chicago, 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.