@Gwendolyn2018 Just figuring this out now are you?...

@Gwendolyn2018 your chagrin & loss. I have simply drawn your attention to a concept. Another is that a broken analogue clock still correctly tells the time twice a day.

@Gwendolyn2018 lol. Your choice as to whether you respond & how. Dude is not in my lexicon. You come across as an entitled American with chips on both shoulders expecting everyone to be the same as you.
"be careful whom you "ping."" - is that a threat? It does not read as advice.
Enjoy the forthcoming new year.

@Gwendolyn2018 We lived in a nice house with $98 a month PITI loan payment because my father had his VA loan. We still had ups and downs and at times got the FDA subsidized food handouts and had to eat those dog barf awful free school lunches. As an adult I had problems and ended up homeless 5 times yet still some people not just Republicans think everyone has it easy as an "entitled American..."

@Gwendolyn2018 aha, I learnt "ping" from a Perth, Australia contributor and took it to mean, like the bell on the unattended business reception desk "attention required please". The poet's dictionary on my phone does not include definition of "gotcha" it does however offer further explanation of why the computer software writing Perth member used the expression (penultimate definiton).
I assume that your definiton is American colloquialism arising from the slavery of people owning others as legal slaves or through so called religious driven indoctrination claiming male superiority & entitlement to own (inferior/lesser beings) women. Citibank used to have an alternative expression for employee slavery - mortgage indenture.

As for the water well - you possibly had a purer potable water than that from the town piping system. It was unlikely to have travelled through rusty or lead pipes. It also gives us something in common - I too had no in house running water for six years when living off grid.
My most regretful, after 18 months loving relationship, parting was from a Yorkshire, born on the wrong side of the tracks, parent abandoned divorced lusty woman who could not talk to me about the future. That was 35 years ago.

Irrespective of personal striving, America as a country, has an expectation of entitlement. It is evident to most of the rest of the world. That parts of American society have been contributing to satisfying that expectation of entitlement has been largely hidden from the rest of the world. Nor do I read minds, thank you for correcting my knowledge of your history.

@Gwendolyn2018 In America we do have an entitled few but those are the 1% wealth holders not the average person who under capitalism is born into debt and dies in debt because without family wealth to keep you out of that hole capitalism keeps digging you in deeper. People from more socialist inclined countries are ignorant of the truth just as the "Ugly American" tourist is ignorant to everyone around him because though he is deeply in debt trying to put on the image of wealth he is as deeply deluded as they are.

@Gwendolyn2018 lets not argue about who had it worst or I may have to drop into the "nay, lass, poverty? Tha's never seen poverty til ye lived in t'shoe box in t'gutter" and "my shovel's blacker than yours" routines!
The fact is succesive US governments have indoctrinated or allowed the world to believe that you live in the Hollywood glamour & lifestyles shown on the screens. I never forget the quote of a German General on being told an American buck private soldier had been captured in France with a sponge cake in his knapsck that was made in Boston only the previous day - "We've lost".

For 50+ years I have watched American wars destroy other countries so that their assets could be pirated by American companies in order for you to have the cheapest oil for your squadron of bombers circling the globe to service your self created & perpetuating paranoia, overpowered vehicles, house heating and goods of convenience.

I suggest that following the dust bowl tragedies there were just as many indigents in America as there are now. The difference now being mainly one of denied expectation. I heartily recommend that you embroil yourself in listening to something like the radio programmes produced by the late Utah Phillips now available as 100+ hours of peoples long memories. [thelongmemory.com]
Being American there is much that you will recognise but have to reconsider.

Enjoy.

Yes, even today and in a different country the social stigma of my birthplace is used by some to try to belittle me. I am not ashamed to state that I was born in Blackpool, NW Lancashire, England. . . I had no say in the matter!

@Gwendolyn2018 Oh did I forget to mention that the ugly American is almost invisible any more because so many other countries are producing ugly tourists? Since around the late 70s' Australia has been producing its own brand of ugly that acts even worse than Americans used to act...

@Lizard_of_Ahaz Correcton - it's only since the 70's that they found it preferable to shit in other's backyards rather than their own. By the mid 70's it was reported that 95% of Australians had never been more than 50 klms from their birthplaces.

And a more recent parody

Of course the 2002 Bali bombing caused a slight hiatus in Bali's popularity.
[en.m.wikipedia.org]

@Gwendolyn2018 Seriously Gwendoline get real. A Japanese tourist pushed you in Canada, a country where you were a foreign guest and your sense of entitlement results in you complaining years later. Ffs try reading what your country men did in pursuit of American entitlement in 1945
[en.m.wikipedia.org]
I'm surprised that the Japanese person didn't kick you to the ground.
And then again from 1991 onwards in Iraq with depleted uranium -
[globalresearch.ca]

@Gwendolyn2018 "this is my last response to you" good. Your aggression & belief in your entitlement is becoming obscene.