Not everyone had steak every Saturday night when they were growing up. I don't think anything brought the reality of the Great Depression home to me more than my mother's description of eating corn meal mush for dinner. The wheat was seven cents a pound down at the feed store, right next to the layer mash. Rice was 29 cents a pound. The next question is one I ask at dinner parties a lot.
People are surprising.
One evening, when my daughter was a Girl Scout, we adults were sitting around the fire after the girls had gone to their tents. Talk turned to wool sweaters scented with wood smoke, and other memorable odors. When World War II broke out he'd lied about his age and gone to Guadalcanal as a Sea Bee. Our children took ballet lessons with the children of a thin, scholarly piano teacher. I never thought of him as an athlete until he swam the length of our pool, twice, underwater.