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It was late summer or early fall of 1988, and there was the owner of the grocery store where I regularly shopped, standing there with a box of food. He had made the unfortunate business decision of trying to open a third grocery store in a two-grocery-store town. As he closed up shop, facing bankruptcy, he brought food to some of his customers who he knew needed it.

I was 21, married with two children, and another on the way. I had a low-paying journalism job and no health insurance. The Women-Infant-Child program checks kept the refrigerator and cupboards full of milk, eggs, cheese, peanut butter and cereal.

There were times when I stood in line at his store with a grocery cart of food and he let me back-date a check for a payday that was a week away.

The box of food was a godsend.

I remember feeling a combination of blessed and chagrined, both for myself and the generous man who was losing his business.

The other day, I pondered that long-stowed-away memory as I did something I had never done before.

I filed for unemployment.

Last week, I was furloughed from my job as metro columnist for the Post-Dispatch. All of my fellow employees who are members of the United Media Guild have to take two weeks off without pay because of cuts made by the newspaper’s parent company, Lee Enterprises, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Like hundreds of thousands of Missourians and more than 30 million Americans, I found myself navigating an unemployment site, trying to take advantage of the federal coronavirus relief aid that is supplementing unemployment — including for employees who are furloughed — with $600 weekly payments.

Fact is, I’m lucky. For one of the first times in my life, I have just enough savings to get me out of the “paycheck-to-paycheck� category. There are millions of Americans worse off than I am, and this week, I’m back at work, earning my full paycheck, as plenty of others wonder when they’ll see another one.

Unlike them, I don’t have to look for a job. I don’t have to fret that it might take a little longer than I hoped for the check from the Department of Labor to arrive. I won’t have to make one of those Sophie’s choices that people living in poverty so often have to make: Car payment or day care? Medicine or electric bill? Do I request one more week of unemployment, even though I found a new job, just to help me get by?

These are the difficult decisions made by people trying to feed their children — or other people’s children — every day.

That day more than three decades ago, when the grocery store owner brought me the food?

There’s a reason he knocked on the back door. He was breaking the law. In fact, that food belonged to the bank that was foreclosing on his store. Those were the bank’s assets, not his. But he knew that food would sit in the store unused for weeks or months, that the perishable food would rot, and the other items would be pilfered at an auction by the other stores in town.

So he offered a helping hand to families who needed it.

These days, there are long lines of people at food banks in ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ and elsewhere who never expected they’d be there. There are people filing for unemployment who have been working hard their entire lives. As the economy collapses like never before in most of our lifetimes, the people who cut our hair, serve our food, mow our lawns and stock our grocery store shelves with food need our help, our empathy and our understanding, as we as a nation enter uncharted waters.

As I write this, BJC HealthCare, one of the largest employers in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ region, announced that it furloughed nearly 3,000 employees last week. The very health care professionals saving those infected from COVID-19 are losing their jobs, too.

While I was on furlough, the Missouri Legislature was rehashing an old Republican bromide that too many “able-bodied� people are using Medicaid. Despite similar proposals in other states being tossed by the courts as unconstitutional barriers to needed aid, lawmakers were considering implementing stringent work requirements that would make it harder for some people to get health care, even though they live below federal poverty standards.

It made me mad.

I’m able-bodied and last week I applied for unemployment. It made me think about the people I often write about, who often face hard-to-comprehend challenges to feed their families, provide shelter from the rain and cold, and just scrape together enough income to make it to the next week.

My hope amid these uncertain economic times is that those of us who are using government aid to help us get through the coronavirus pandemic think about the others who find themselves in that position even in better economic times. Perhaps this national tragedy can strengthen our social contract so that next time our neighbor is in need, the rest of us will put food in a box and leave it at the back door.