Mama cooked bologna for breakfast

I was just thinking about how things were when I was a little girl at home in Elba, AL. Daddy was a carpenter and mama stayed at home during the early years with me and my two older brothers. I never did go to school without breakfast. Somehow they always had the money I needed to pay for my lunch all week at school, and I ate it too! Daddy helped build the first building of Kelley Foods of Alabama. You see he was a carpenter and that is what he did as long as I can remember. Because he was working down at the plant, daddy would bring long rolls of bologna wrapped in a red plastic covering home for us to eat. It was the same red covering that we see today on the slices. It was gathered on each end with a metal wire of some sort. You get the picture of the shape and it must have been 18" long. Mama sliced and cooked it for us. She made biscuits and scrambled eggs. We didn't have much money but mama and daddy took care of us and saw that we had food to eat. That bologna was something when mama cooked it. First of all, if you've never done it, you have to know that it curls up and makes a bowl. Mama would slice it around each round piece to make it lay flat and she let it brown. I don't remember it being good necessarily but it fed us. We didn't have to wait until we got to school to eat, nor did we get it at a reduced price even though we probably would have been considered low income. When we got to school we went to work learning. 

Mama always ordered my clothes from the Sears Roebuck Catalog. She ordered me different colored jeans. I remember getting a red, blue, and green pair and one little pair of brown lace up oxford shoes each year. She made lots of my clothes out of flour sacks. One time when I was older mama took a pair of daddy's nice dress slacks and made me a skirt . I was mighty proud of it and felt so dressed up. Mama used what she had to help us survive and not what she wished she had. She made every penny count as the old saying goes.

I guess all three of us turned out all right in life. We learned to work for what we had and didn't expect anybody to give us anything along the way. If we didn't have it, we did without and worked to get it. I may be wrong but the way I see it is that wasn't a bad way to be brought up. It helps us to be more content today I think. That is just what I'm thinking today.