Before being disguised to look like debit cards, food stamps resembled legit, paper money. Smaller than real bills, they came crowded together in wallet-sized checkbooks, in pastel denominations of 5\u2019s, 10\u2019s and 20\u2019s. We\u2019d wander the market, Mom and I, collecting cold slabs of beef, discounted soups, and stacks of bleached, flavorless breads. Government rules for food stamps were unflinching and prepared or \u201chot\u201d foods were strictly forbidden. So we kept clear of the deli, the bakery, of the shimmering spits of rotisserie chickens and pies baking fresh in roaring, steel ovens. We could see, we could smell, but we absolutely could not touch.<\/p>\n
At the register, my mother tore the stamps from the book. The soothing pink of a 5. The cool blue of a 10. The lemon yellow of a 20. In her fingers, a rainbow of stained paper colors emerged. She\u2019d hand the cashiers the bright, make-believe money, and they\u2019d give her real money in change. I watched her shove the crumpled bills down her pocket, an alchemy of conversion that seemed surreal and near magic. Presto! Fake money into real money, from nothing into something.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is for us, for free?\u201d The boxes were stacked at our door, dropped off by volunteers from local food shelters. \u201cThis is just ours?\u201d I\u2019d ask. \u201cWe get all of this?\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the box, an assortment of items sealed in industrialized, black and tan cardboard. Waxy blocks of sharp cheddar cheese. Instant, fat-free dehydrated milk. Unsalted crackers. Every box, every month, the same foods every time, including a white, waxy box labeled in aggressive black caps, \u201cBROWNIE BATTER.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease,\u201d my brother and I begged, presenting the box\u00a0to Mom. \u201cPlease, can we eat this?\u201d Her sigh was a nonverbal surrender, and we\u2019d pour sweet heaps of dirt colored dust into cracked plastic tumblers, blend it with tap water, and drink\/chew our way through clots of generic, cake-flavored sludge.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo good,\u201d we\u2019d say to each other through teeth stained black with saccharine grit. We\u2019d consider our privilege, our luck, that allowed us to drink brownie mix from a cup. What other kids in the world could do that? \u201cSo good,\u201d we\u2019d say. \u201cIsn\u2019t this good?\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Gleaners, a roving band of volunteers who rescued discarded food from local grocery stores and mini marts, set up shop outside of a different house every month. Sometimes they\u2019d be in someone\u2019s backyard, other times spilling out of a cluttered garage, 4×4 parts sneaking up to their backs. Hovering behind a hodgepodge of plastic card tables, the Gleaners would heap past their sale date donuts, cupcakes, and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches into oversized, clear plastic bags.<\/p>\n
A mile of people piled ahead in a line, no matter how early or late we arrived. Mom, forced to endure her children\u2019s whining and fighting, would threaten us with spankings, with groundings, with things we knew she lacked the strength to deliver. So we stuck to our fighting, soaking wet grass revealing every hole in our sneakers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you so much,\u201d Mom would say when it was our turn at the tables, hoisting the plastic bag she was handed into her arms. Heading home, the air candied and sick from the scent of our haul, my brother and I plunged our hands into the bag\u2019s sticky innards, battling for pastries, our fingers like slight, fleshly scales that could measure by touch the weight of each donut\u2019s freshness.<\/p>\n
\u201cA sandwich first, then dessert,\u201d Mom commanded. She\u2019d catch our eyes in the rearview mirror. \u201cAnd the date. Make sure you check the date.\u201d<\/p>\n
I pulled a half sandwich from the bag. Turkey, with cheese, on white bread, mummified in clear cellophane. On a faint, gummy label, a series of numbers I could barely make out. I passed the sandwich up to her. Mom squinted at the label and again, I watched her face strain from the burden.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay. I think\u2026 this\u2026 should be okay.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A bright Monday morning, and a girl in my class raised her hand when Ms. D\u2019Aboy asked what we did over the weekend. She\u2019d had a birthday, and she wanted to show off the shining, silver watch she\u2019d received. Other kids followed suit, raising their hands, and an impromptu exhibit of watches, bracelets, and jewelry began. No watch, no bracelets, no jewelry to share, I kept my hands locked at my sides.<\/p>\n
That afternoon, I flashed my monthly lunch card, a gift from the county, at a boy in line next to me inside our school cafeteria. He had to pay for his lunch, one dollar a day, every day, with money he got from his parents. All the kids did. Wadded up singles folded into wallets or fistfuls of coins in zipped sandwich baggies, surrendered to our lunchroom cashier. But not me. I received a new card every month, which I signed in my most extravagant cursive, each letter building up to a crescendo that screamed out my name. I finally wanted to show off what I had to share. Look at my name on the back of this card, after all. Look at how fancy, look what it told the world about me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have to pay for my lunch,\u201d I said, revealing my card. \u201cSee? This means I don\u2019t have to pay.\u201d<\/p>\n
The boy glanced at my card. He snorted. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to pay because you can\u2019t afford to pay. That\u2019s what that card means. You get your lunch for free because you\u2019re poor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Made out of paper, frail as it was thin, the lunch card collapsed as my fingers wrapped around it. Somewhere inside, some part of me collapsed just the same. I looked down at my clothes, at my plain yellow t-shirt and faded blue jeans, my grubby white sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. They weren\u2019t so different from the clothes of everyone else standing near me. In the same way that food stamps gave an impression of currency, hadn\u2019t I given an impression of sameness? But the county was paying my bill and my bill alone. No one else in the lunch line could brag about that. Look at my name on this lunch card, I\u2019d said, and my classmates did just what I\u2019d asked. And they knew exactly what it said about me.<\/p>\n
My turn in line, and I handed my card to the cashier. And suddenly I could see through the eyes of my mother, handing a fistful of food stamps to the grocery store checker.<\/p>\n
My turn in line, and I was handed a tray of food I didn\u2019t pay for. And how easy to feel the hands of my mother, hoisting a box of basic foods from our porch, struggling a bag of expiring baked goods and meats into the back seat of her car.<\/p>\n
My turn in line, and how easy to now imagine my mother, a child just like me, in a lunch line at school, thinking a paper lunch card made them special, unaware it was for all the wrong reasons, unaware of what it said of them now and what it threatened to say for their future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My turn in line, and how easy to now imagine my mother, a child just like me, in a lunch line at school, thinking a paper lunch card made them special, unaware it was for all the wrong reasons, unaware of what it said of them now and what it threatened to say for their future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3529],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-nonfiction","writer-will-mcmillan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24065"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25036,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24065\/revisions\/25036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}