We recently returned from a road trip that took us, among other places, to Michigan. The first thing that struck me was just how much shabbier the highways are in the midwest. The recession looms large there. En route to Michigan, we drove through the other struggling state of Ohio. Here too, there was seeming calmness, except that the big fat debris of tyre bits left by big eighteen-wheelers had not been picked up. Judging by the amount of debris on the roads in Michigan and Ohio, nobody had cleaned in several days or maybe weeks. Despite all the grumbling we engage in here, in southwestern Connecticut, our infrastructure is still intact, if seriously creaky. There was a normality too, the houses didn't seem any better or worse than ones I have seen here. But inside those houses, who knows what the people were going through?
And, inexorably, like a bad dream, like the proverbial freight train, the recession has come closer to home. An acquaintance here is moving out to a western state, unable to withstand anymore the double whammy of losing her job and expensive repairs to a storm-damaged house. Another friend in the midwest is on the verge of declaring personal bankruptcy. Thirty years of a successful business all lost to the tsunami of an economic crisis of historic proportions. Elsewhere, friends in the corporate world are complaining of enormous stresses at jobs that no longer seem either secure or particularly fulfilling. I also have friends who have had to take paycuts but are thankful to at least have a job at all. And some of these people I know are immigrants like me, so they feel the tenuousness of their position particularly keenly. Where do you go when your nearest support system is thousands of miles away?
It all makes me very nervous. I have never felt that money came to me very easily. The line of work I am in is not renowned for making millionaires of its practitioners. I have made my peace with this enforced frugality, in return for a measure of job satisfaction. But job satisfaction does not pay bills, especially not the kind of bills that we see here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. So, now I think it is time for me to reconsider my financial attitudes, to search for a way in which I can contribute better and more meaningfully to the household economy. Poor K., the main provider for us, might need from me a less head-in-the-clouds attitude. But then again, the question is how?....Where are the jobs? And, just as importantly, what are the jobs? And finally, do I really want to do anything other than write?....