We only had to do it once last summer. Only once because when friends got wind of what was happening, they sent gift cards to Albertsons and Safeway, money even. I’m a writer, so I’m supposed to know how to say difficult things, how to blend the mundane with the significant, how to tell a story, how to make the sad at least bearable. I started e-mails in which I blathered on about my love for Mary Jane shoes, or my obsession with Neko Case, hoping to find a moment where I could say, “By the way. Last week? I took the kids to a soup kitchen.” I wrote e-mails about Cuba and the welfare system and the crumbling middle class, yet none of them landed in an in box with the admission that I had taken my kids one Tuesday in July, drove downtown and walked into a soup kitchen to eat dinner — parking far enough away so that no one would see we actually had a car.