Free Closing Time by Joe Queenan Page B

were so devoid of basic human dignity that you literally had to beg the government for money. This strongly suggested that you were a bum, a perception reinforced by the routine involved in obtaining the federal government’s monthly food allowances. In the days before food stamps were invented, people on welfare were given vouchers for use at designated supermarkets. The vouchers could not be used to purchase fair-traded brand goods; they could be used to acquire only baking supplies. Every month or so, we would exchange these vouchers for allotments of flour, sugar, canned egg yolks, and powdered milk. The powder could be mixed with water to make a clotted beverage that tasted like calamine lotion; the egg yolks gave off a disgusting odor not unlike that of rotting eggs; sometimes, if the containers had ruptured, the flour and cornmeal were already playing host to bugs festering jubilantly inside.
    The supermarket stored the baking supplies in metal compartments directly beneath the fruit and vegetables, creating a jarring juxtaposition of the immanent and the potential. The flour, cornmeal, and milk came in generic brown cardboard boxes, so as we trooped out of the store shoppers who were not on welfare could see that we were. As we had no car and the establishment could not be reached on foot, my father had to ask a neighbor to drive him to pick up our monthly supply of ingredients that served little more than a decorative function in our home. Sometimes he would bring us along, thereby allowing us to share in the humiliation of being viewed as “pikers.” All the while we would cast envious glances at the Cheerios and Wheaties beckoning to us from the nearby shelves; all the while we could feel the contemptuous stares of the staff.
    For the Queenan family, these shopping excursions were pointless, as my mother possessed neither the talent nor the inclination to bake bread, muffins, cookies, or cakes. Before she met my father, she worked as a secretary at the Navy Yard at the southern tip of the city. Unlike her husband, who had not finished ninth grade, she had a high school diploma and considerable white-collar experience. She was the product of a slightly loftier economic class and a better neighborhood than he was; her own father was a baker, employed by a venerable Philadelphia bread company, whereas my father’s father was a common laborer. She had worked hard to rise above the circumstances into which she was born, evincing a ladylike aplomb that was otherwise in short supply in the project. She never dressed especially well, as our financial situation prohibited it, but she spoke well; she was never vulgar or profane and never displayed any emotion in public. She was blue-collar in neither temperament nor demeanor, and she never would be.
    Ditching her job when she married my father was the biggest mistake of her life, a self-engineered calamity she would never cease to regret. Marriageable, presentable males were in short supply after the war, so, to use her terminology, she “grabbed the first guy off the boat.” She then proceeded to have four children, not because it was her lifelong dream to raise a family but because children were what married people had. Large families were a Catholic tradition in that era; children were the unavoidable by-products of cohabitation; any effort to frustrate the natural procreative process assured one of an eternity in Hell. Compliantly, my parents adhered to the Church-mandated birth-control method known as “rhythm,” a jerkwater procedure that did not so much prevent conception as reduce its likelihood by 13.6 percent. Had she been born a few decades later, by which point the Church had started to look the other way whenever the issue of recreational sex was raised, she might never have given birth. Procreation, parenting, anything involving nurturing, was a burr under her saddle; even when we were adults, she did not hesitate to remind us that being a mother was a