When I was a youngster working in my parents’ grocery store in Summit Hill, Carbon County, many miners’ families and others would charge their purchases.

“Put it on the book,” they would say.

They didn’t have the money until payday. Then once a week or once every two weeks, they would either pay off what they owed or pay something toward the total, all, of course, interest-free.

There were no credit checks, no checking credit scores, nothing like that. It was pretty much of an unwritten oral contract between my parents and our customers that they would be good to their word and pay off their bill when they could.

As expected, there were some customers who “stiffed” my parents, but most paid like clockwork.

Sometimes there were family emergencies, and the ``missus” would explain to my mom or dad that she couldn’t make a payment because of unexpected expenses.

My parents always understood.

They had run the store during the Great Depression, and I heard the stories about how they helped desperate townspeople in need - people who had lost their jobs through no fault of their own, people who didn’t have two nickels to rub together and were trying to survive any way they could. Back then, families of five, six or more were commonplace.

They needed help, but there was no government program to send them a $1,200 check or give them unemployment benefits. They had to rely on family, friends and sympathetic shop-owners like my parents.

Most of us have seen the unsettling scenes of the bread lines of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s. We shook our heads and patted ourselves on the back saying we would never see scenes like that again. That was ancient history. This was modern-day America. We were the richest country in the world.

And then came the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, we have seen the massive layoffs starting last March and continuing until this very day, the lines of vehicles at food banks and other food-distribution sites as millions of jobless in our nation try to get the necessities of life and hang on until better times come back.

Congress has passed another stimulus bill which will provide some temporary relief, but it is essentially a Band-Aid until either COVID-19 is brought under control and businesses get pumping again or until there is more long-lasting governmental assistance.

As most medical and scientific experts have cautioned, even with two vaccines having come to market and others on the way, it will not be like throwing an on-off light switch.

The analogy I like is when you turn on a dimmer light switch, and the light crescendos gradually to its full luminescence.

Our American hubris convinced us that a catastrophe of this scope and magnitude could never happen to us - not in 2020, not in the United States, not in a nation that is used to considering itself as No. 1.

Earlier in the year, we viewed with horror how the coronavirus had overwhelmed Europe, and epidemiologists warned us that we would soon see here what we were seeing there.

We scoffed at the notion. No way. We had this under control. After all, President Donald Trump assured us it was.

Of course, we now know the truth.

Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States, now estimates that 17 million people in the United States could become food insecure because of the pandemic, bringing the total to more than 54 million, including 18 million children.

Before COVID-19, food insecurity was at its lowest since the Great Recession in 2008-09, but it still impacted 37 million people.

Since food insecurity and poor nutrition are associated with several chronic illnesses that put people at higher risk for the more severe complications of COVID-19, the food access crisis threatens to exacerbate the already glaring disparities in health outcomes for vulnerable people.

We are dealing with the reality of the situation. After a respite in the summer, each day now we get somber statistics about the numbers who are infected, how many died, how many are hospitalized and how many are on ventilators.

The predictions are dire for the next few months as concerns rise for further infections caused by people who ignored calls to stay home during the recent holidays.

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Editor’s note: Bruce Frassinelli is a former newspaper editor and currently a contributor to the opinion page of the TIMES NEWS, Lehighton, our sister daily newspaper.