My mom used to take me 

downtown

every 

Saturday

, a forty minute drive, so that I could volunteer with her at a 

soup kitchen

. She told me it was good for building my character, but she also knew that my dad needed a break at least one day of the week. So that's when we'd leave him alone.

I always found it strange that they called it a soup kitchen even though we didn't always serve 

soup

. We did sometimes serve soup, but often we'd serve more common 

American

food stuff like 

pizza

and 

Spaghetti

. There'd always be at least one healthy looking thing -- usually a bare

salad

-- but these were not crowd pleasers. I once asked my mom on the drive home why none of the people that day took the salad, and she said it was because they were 

hungry

. 

"These people. They are very hungry. They don't get to eat everyday. Or if they do they need to always worry where their next meal is going to come from."

"Why are there people like that?"

"it's a very cruel world, honey."

I thought about saying, I'm glad that we weren't like that, but something caught my tongue.