Our Fortunes

Years ago at a party, a friend of mine and I were comparing our palm reading abilities. I had some vague knowledge of lifelines and the complications implied by having your heart line too wrapped up with your head, but really I tended to make things up. My friend giggled at my forecasts. It was all right with me, believing most of what I was saying to be hogwash as well—but these are the things people sometimes find themselves doing at parties. Looking at my palm he laughed and said that according to Indian palm reading, I had a very lucky set of fortunes. Whether dirt poor or wealthy, I would always be taken care of, there would somehow be enough. And then with a wink (that showed he knew how much his next comment would irritate me), he told me I would marry rich. Playing my part, I withdrew my hand, put it on my hip and stuck out my tongue.

His evaluation of my palm has been weighing on my mind lately, not because I expect its veracity, but because, to this point, the predictions have borne out. When I was a child, despite living well below the poverty line, my mother had a knack for survival and though we never had extra, we had enough. When we lost our home, her charm—the sort that comes from a gentle kindness people immediately respond to—resulted in finding a forgiving landlord who would occasionally go months without asking for the rent. She did her best, and in turn, a good number of people did their best for her. The end result was that a somewhat unstable life was spared from becoming more so.

Living on my own, I’ve flitted rather irresponsibly from one low-paying job to the next, my bleeding heart generally leading me ahead. I’ve been out of the country multiple times with an empty bank account and somehow still managed (often due to the interest-bearing love and care of my credit card). Still, my financial silliness has yet to seriously blow up in my face.

After college, I moved out of state with the man who would eventually be my husband. I had an AmeriCorps stipend (a sweet $9,000 a year salary), and he still had not found his first post-college job. We stressed. We coupon-cut. But we made it until he found work, and we relived that anxiety and relief each time we moved or I moved on from a job.

I think about all of this now, because despite the fact that I’ve quite well adapted to living on little, I can readily find a way to adapt to living on much more, so that I am never quite responsible with money, never quite concerned with paying off debt, and save only if my account is set up to automatically hide money from me in a savings account. Good fortune is the only explanation for my current situation, when so many more responsible people are watching the bottom drop out.

We have friends who have stuck with the same, seemingly stable job, since college. They have a certain level of seniority, but are being laid off. We have friends who have never left a balance on their credit card from month to month, who bought houses well within their budgets, who now can’t afford their bills. I often joke that with our combined student debt, my husband and I could buy a really nice house. Somehow that joke is becoming far less funny.

The economic decline is showing how fickle fortune is. For far too many people that we care about, its icy reality is a mix of panic and tragedy, as well-made plans fracture around them. Worse still, than not knowing where the money for next months’ bills will come from is the fact that so many people’s dreams for themselves are being wiped out. To work for years toward a career goal and find something meaningful—to know what it’s like to be a teacher, a firefighter, an environmental engineer, to have an identity wrapped up in one’s good work, and lose it… well, that’s just too much.

In the face of that, my own history of money woes and, certainly, my inability to settle on a career path seem nothing short of childish. I am witnessing loss in my friends’ lives that is nothing but horrible and cruel. And worse yet, things are only going to get worse, at least for all but the wealthiest. The market, the beast whose moods analysts assess daily (with about as much legitimacy as my palm reading), does not look ready to cooperate. The economy is dropping, dropping away. And if it could be graphed alongside it, the hope and general welfare of too many good people is also sloping off toward zero.