Uphill Both Ways With A Bum Knee

Aside from his belief that "if you enjoy what you're doing, you should cut it out and get a job," the thing most strongly asserted by Hal during my tenure within the walls of the Hawken home was that he had it a LOT harder than Ben and I did growing up.

How much harder was immeasurable. If it started to appear measurable, it retroactively became even worse.

Apparently, despite the fact that when Hal was a kid a movie only cost a nickel, the average daily wage was actually negative 17 cents. "Yeah," Hal will remark with smugness, "we had to pay to work in my day."

When struggling to learn my major scales on the piano, Hal would point out that it was a lot harder when he had to learn on a piano that had razorblades embedded in the keys.

When Ben joined the swim team, Hal would note that their school couldn't afford a pool and they had to swim through dirt.

This difficulty gap was not only supposed to make us grateful that we didn't have to partake of the indigent circumstances of his childhood, but also grateful that he was so benevolent.

Upon applying to my university's school of music, my dad reminded me that I should be grateful that he was allowing me to be a music major. Upon announcing his intention to not major in Chewing On Barbed Wire, Hal's father apparently put him in a scorpion-lined box and then rolled the box down a hill.

In fact, from a composite of descriptions of his childhood, I can infer that Hal's father was 8 feet tall, performed black magic, ate rocks and was made of out of a combination of steel and anger.

It should be noted that The Beast didn't have a charmed childhood either. Apparently, when her parents made her share a bed with her sister, my aunt regularly stabbed her with a sharpened toothbrush.

Also, something confirmed by both parents is that in their day, instead of being administered with a standard hypodermic needle, inoculations were administered by 86 individual needles, each of which being approximately 2 inches wide, and covered with salt.