Thanks

I’m a glass half-cynical kind of girl, which is why holidays like Thanksgiving are important. As a prelude to New Years, I find myself making tryptophan-induced resolutions.

1. I will be more patient with my mom, and try not to take her for granted.

2.I will appreciate and indulge in life’s small pleasures–namely stuffing and pumpkin pie leftovers.

3. I will continue, (keeping in mind #2), to go to the gym.

Christina, my mom’s friend, smiles at me from across the now cleared table. I love Christina. She’s full of life, blunt, and never asks me the typical questions. Or if she does, I like her so much I don’t even find them annoying, which is a real feat. Christina’s a Jewish Nuyorican (that’s a Puerto Rican New Yorker to you West Coasters), which means she has the chutzpah of not one, but two, outspoken ethnicities.  She’s waited this long to ask me the question, and has the decency to put it creatively.

“So Rachel, where are you now?  You know, in this play of your life? What Act are you in?”

I don’t hesitate. When she puts it that way, the answer seems obvious.

“I guess you could say I’m at intermission.”

Christina laughs, and agrees that seems appropriate for my age. She goes on to tell me how she used to think she knew what she wanted.

” I went to law school, and I was sure I wanted to be a civil rights attorney. Well, while I was in school, all the laws started changing, making it even harder to bring civil rights cases to court, changing the definitions of what constitutes a group, all that stuff.  And then I didn’t pass the bar, and I realized, man, I don’t actually want to do this.

So I go on later to study to be a teacher and I realize, now this is what I should have been doing all along. I love this, being around learning, kids, books.  So I become a teacher, and I do that in Oakland for 10 years.  And then the crack epidemic happens, and No Child Left Behind comes in, and I’m tired.  And I couldn’t do it anymore.  Maybe if I had stuck with it I could have.  Just like if I’d stuck with law, I could have been a judge, that’s where a lot of my friends from then are now.

But I realized, man, I don’t want to work those hours. I don’t want that success. And I wanted a family. And I wanted to make pies, and have a LIFE.  And you know what? I look at some of my more successful friends, and you know what I think? I wouldn’t trade my life of failure for their life of success.  Ever.”

That last line echos in my head, and I like it. I’d wouldn’t trade my life of failure for their life of success.  She says the line without bitterness, or even the repression of bitterness. You can tell.  She knows she made a choice.  She’s less impressive for it, and she wouldn’t change a thing.

Still, Christina was never one to give up completely. She still works in the public school system, only now she holds an equally thankless and difficult job: guidance counselor.

Her last piece of advice before she changes the subject to Ivanka Trump?

“You can’t blame yourself for being a have-not in America anymore. How terrible that I would tell a woman who went to NYU she’s a have-not, but you just don’t live in a country that takes care of the middle-class, or young people anymore. People your age should just make as much money as they can now so that by the time Social Security is totally gone they can say, ‘Hm, where do I want to go? Mexico? Europe?'”

I laugh, but she’s probably right about my generation’s future, our grim economic prospects.

But I give thanks, because for once, I’m not so cynical. I might be living in the Shitseccsion, with a family that’s struggling and a temp job that runs out in a week. But I’m no have-not.

I have the family and the leftovers to prove it.