Growing Up Poor In Canada

When I was little my main toy was my hockey set. It was handed down to my brother and I by relatives with more hockey set money than my family ever had. In the summer, when we did not play too many hockey games, we would get something like two tin cans and a length of fishing line to entertain us until winter returned.

We thought we were poor and we acted like it, giving rich people a hard fucking time. We were not poor though. We had a second hand hockey set.

Ian's wife Sylvia told me about how poor she was growing up in Toronto's Polish ghetto. "Sometimes all we had to play with was rocks. Not even good shiny ones, just dirty grey rocks. When we were good our mother would give us chicken legs to play with. These my sisters and I would dress up like Barbie dolls until we got hungry and then we would
eat them, dipping them in fresh rabbit blood my mother was given by our friend, a Polish butcher, because we could not afford ketchup and he wanted to fuck my mother."

"You ate blood-dipped chicken leg Barbies?"

"When I am pregnant, which is quite often, thanks to my fuck all the time Canadian husband, I get cravings for them."

"Just like I get cravings for KD and stale beer steeped overnight in cigarette butts."

"Something like that," Sylvia said as she thought about beer and cigarettes. "Like the way people from Toronto crave a good hockey game."