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Monday, August 18, 2008 12:00 AM

Our cupboard was bare

I had a master's degree. I had a job. But to feed my three children, I had to swallow my pride and go to a soup kitchen.

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  • Monday, August 18, 2008 10:46 AM

    the other shoe...

    Hey, self-righteous moron commenters who think you're so much smarter and have such better judgment than Heather Ryan, I'm just waiting for the day when your comfortable, safe job vanishes, your spouse comes down with a debilitating illness, and your parents suddenly need round-the-clock care.

    I can't wait for the comments you'll so richly deserve. You should have known that CS degree wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. You should have made sure that the person you married didn't have any serious health conditions in his/her background when you popped the question. Oh, and as for your parents' monthly medication bills: did you know that you can substitute homeopathic remedies for just pennies a day? Try a potato dangling from a string round the neck to draw out fever! Who needs antibiotics? You're just not being creative enough.

    My father was an electrical engineer who worked on computerized dashboards for 18-wheelers. He was out of work for months at a time in the eighties. There were three of us kids. Never had to eat in a soup kitchen, but we wore second hand clothes and got a few boxes of Reagan cheese at a couple points. Once, we came upon a train that had collided with a truck with a huge load of frozen meat from Australia, and my father walked away with a thirty-pound package. It turned out later that the meat was tough and stringy and intended to be made into dog food, but my mother cooked it for hours and hours in a crockpot until it was edible, and we ate that stuff for a month. (I think it was beef. I hope it was beef.)

    It can happen to anyone, even the people who pride themselves on how much more sensible their choices are than the rest of ours. I'm guessing you think you can stave off the badness by picking on others who chose differently. You'd be wrong about that.

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