Shared bonds

While listening to a somber chorus of woe on television news from fearful, desperate SNAP recipients, suddenly my memory snapped to a scene perhaps 75-80 years ago.

I was probably 7-8 years old, sent by mother to the corner Co-Op in our hometown, Lansdowne, to buy our lunch.

Trembling, I was saying to the clerk, “Sir, two thin slices of boiled ham and two thin slices of American cheese, please.”

I was old enough to be embarrassed, aware enough to be mortified, for I was announcing to the public that our family cookie jar and cupboard were both nearly bare.

Today, I pick up a prepackaged wad of Lebanon bologna at Weis without a second thought. Back then, for a time in the 1940s, I was lunching on sandwiches from half-loaves of bread whose contents were barely visible.

In a later era of packed refrigerators and glutted freezers, some internal censor had banished this childhood event of poignant reality to a deep dark circle of Memory Hell, never to rattle consciousness again.

But now I suffered the shock of recognition, the pang of identification. I, too, had stood on the same narrow shaky precipice on which they stood, seeking emotional balance.

I immediately bonded with these budget-bludgeoned SNAP victims. I had been there. I was like them, with them, on the verge of the unspeakable: totally empty wallets, completely empty stomachs.

On the tail of such horror, the moment was divinely scripted. For just then in my email appeared New Bethany’s request for donations and contributions to aid our helpless local Snappers threatened with such abominable misery.

To which I immediately responded with celerity and alacrity and, you bet, abundant generosity.