It’s one of my favorite bits of family lore. I was young no older than six and I asked my mother “Mommy are we poor?” My mother as always was there with the snappy — and perfect — answer. “Only the devil is poor ” she said. “We’re just broke.” So were we poor? We didn’t think so. Yes we knew there would be the occasional whispered conferences between Mommy and Daddy about paying “the muggage” (mortgage in European-dialect English). But poor? We had a house with a backyard and plenty to eat. We had new clothes forYomYov. What else would a kid want?  A kid one presumes would want games and toys. A kid would want fun. So what did we “broke” — not poor — kids have to play with? I’ll tell you what we didn’t have. No Lego: That modern plastic brick was patented in 1958 and was still in its infancy when I was in mine.G.I.Joe hadn’t been drafted yet Rubik hadn’t invented his Cube and in the absence of digital technology tech toys and virtual reality were virtually nonexistent. But we had… boxes! Emmy and I took two cardboard boxes put two more on top of them and voilá we had a house. The local paint store had huge books of outdated wallpaper samples which they were happy to share with us. We wallpapered our boxes created furniture out of empty cans and matchboxes decorated them with the indispensable supply of wallpaper samples and played happily for hours peopling the “dollhouse” with imaginary characters.