Food stamps. I needed some new art for the living room, so I used images related to food stamps to make a digital collage and had it printed on canvas; I like how it turned out. Why food stamps? I wanted to reclaim the power of the images. #poverty #dignity #kindness

I have a complicated relationship with food stamps (today we call it SNAP). I’m grateful we had food stamps so we could eat when I was young. There’s one painful memory I can’t shake.

Mom sent me to a grocery store in Greenwood in 1984 with a shopping list and a handful of food stamps which she’d torn out of the booklet they come in.

I knew the rules required you to tear the food stamps out of the booklet in front of the cashier, because it was believed people on food stamps would sell them for cash for drugs, and making people tear the food stamps out at the store would supposedly cut down on fraud;

it’s an absurd notion, but that was the rule. So I got to the checkout, already embarrassed as a teenager to be spending food stamps, and when the cashier saw that I didn’t have the booklet with me, she refused to ring me up and pushed the full shopping cart aside.

I don’t remember much else from 1984, but I remember exactly what that cashier looked like. I walked over to a payphone, called mom, and asked her what to do. Mom called the store manager.

The store manager came and found me at the payphone, walked me back to the check stand, and told the cashier to ring me up.

The cashier rang me up, and as I walked away she said, as if to explain herself: “Well, you can never be too careful.” She wasn’t being careful. Today we still too often subject people who are vulnerable to so many indignities.

It’s memories like this that motivate me to try to always start with love. To start with kindness. To make sure no one ever feels awkward asking me for something. I fall down in this effort a lot, but I’ll keep trying.