Lunch on the Fly

When my mother was a young child during the 1920's in Glasgow, it was the custom to shout up from the street where the kids were sent to play, whenever they needed something from their mothers, instead of running up flights of stairs. Snacks and keys would be tossed out the window to the kids below and nobody bothered about the noise bothering neighbors because everyone did it. My parents would have done the same thing for me in London except our neighbors wouldn't have tolerated the custom of street yelling, so common in the poorer neighborhoods of Glasgow.

The most common snack was bread and jam. They called it a piece and jeelly which would be wrapped in newspaper and tossed down. My mother told me it was also what she took to school for lunch and she sat on hers during class to warm it up for the break which was usually outside in the typical cold of Scotland.
Despite a diet of bread, jam, soup bones and sausages, she somehow grew to five and a half feet, much taller than her friends, and was smart. I marvel at how her bones and brains were built on such poor foods and how she was spared the rickets and other maladies of similarly undernourished youngsters at that time. My father grew to just under six feet, very smart too, and managed to survive on a similar diet though recalls that on Sundays they sometimes had bacon and eggs. During the week, he and his brother would gang up with other boys to run past the greengrocer stands and grab whatever they could, then share it later with their friends. My uncle Jack, even later in his life was nicknamed Anaka's midden, because he ate anything and everything my grandmother saved in her leftovers pot each week. Anaker's was a famous sausage factory and a midden was the name for a dumpster. I can barely imagine what was considered unfit for a sausage and dumped out. Uncle Jack's height was stunted if his humor and brains were not, however.

It makes me wonder why we are so fussy about what we eat when we have evidence of the most amazing development of some of us, despite the crap we eat as kids. Frank McCourt's childhood wasn't exactly brimming with nutritious meals, as with Kirk Douglas and yet they were smart and grew up in tact, enjoying fame and fortune to boot.

I'm about to have a nutritional workup and I think I'm gong to resent every second of it plus the expense. Can't wait to see what she has to say about a piece and jeelly for lunch and let her know my mother lived to her mid 80s and probably longer if she hadn't smoked. As Stanley Kowalski put it: Hah!! I say Hah!!