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"we felt like we were the lucky ones"
In general I like A Softer World, but it can be pretty hit-or-miss. Joey's livejournal though, is always great. And sometimes, like last Friday, it is brilliant and heartbreaking and absolutely true.
"When my brother and I were kids our mom used to send us to the store to get her cigarettes. We would get fifty cents for candy and we'd be done before we got home. I remember buying a bag of chips, back when they still had prizes every once in a while. Little pieces of paper that might win you a free bag. We bought a bag, and won. We won on that bag, and inside the next bag were two free bags. Both of those won, too. We ate all of it before we went home. We sat on the sidewalk with mom's cigarettes in the plastic bag between us, eating chips. God knows what we talked about.
"I never remember dialogue from that age. All my memories of being a kid are of scenarios, are where we were and how we felt. We felt good, that day. We felt like we were the lucky ones. Who cares what we said.
"At this time we were eating a lot of macaroni and cheese. We were pretty poor, and I always forget that this was during the recession. Everyone we knew was poor. One day we woke up to find that there was no milk for our cereal, and so we used Coca Cola. I didn't understand what a recession was. I only learned about it later on, and so I never link the two things in my head. All I remember is eating Kraft Dinner all the time. All I remember is eating Captain Crunch with Coca Cola that morning, and sitting on the sidewalk outside our apartment building and eating bag after bag of Dill Pickle chips, feeling like we'd won the lottery."