I feel sorry for my wife. And not just because she has to put up with me and my bad jokes. I recently have learned that she suffered through a deprived childhood.

As a child, Maria only went on one vacation. One. Uno. That’s it. One trip to the beach when she was little and nothing else.

I love my wife’s parents, but wonder what made them abuse her like that.

Compared to that, I lived a life of luxury. We went to the beach pretty much every year and took other assorted vacations. That old station wagon got around.

I couldn’t imagine living any other way. If we hadn’t traveled, I wouldn’t hear the story from my siblings about the tour guide at Plymouth Rock again and again and again and again.

Without vacations, we wouldn’t have stayed in the same hotel as a minor league baseball team in Montreal when I was a kid. I went down a floor or two with a brother and a sister to get ice and drinks for our room.

As we waited for the elevator, we heard a lot of noise. It got louder and louder until the elevator door opened and revealed a car full of baseball players. Drunk baseball players.

They growled at us and made faces. My brother took off like a shot. My sister and I just backed up against the wall until the elevator door closed. We caught the next car and made it to the room safe and sound.

I feel bad that my wife doesn’t have memories like that. She didn’t get to spend a portion of her childhood riding backwards in the “all the way back” of a station wagon up and down the eastern seaboard.

But it gets worse. Maria was cleaning out the attic the other day and found an old receipt. It was from the first color TV her family owned.

They bought it in 1983.

I think families who didn’t have color TV by 1983 were forced to buy one by the government to end the suffering across America.

Again, this makes me seem like the kid from “Silver Spoons.” We had our first VCR four years before that. Of course the thing was the size of a modern-day washing machine, but we loved it.

I can understand the no vacations thing. They cost money and take time and can bring out the worst in some people. But no color television?

I know I had a TV in my room by then, but it may have still been a black and white set. If it was color, I feel guilty now.

I have asked a lot of questions to try and understand this situation. Her father had a good job. They didn’t live in poverty. She didn’t grow up in a communist country.

They just didn’t have color television. I guess it takes all kinds to make the world go around. I’m just glad she survived the ordeal without any lasting damage.