On May 25th, 2007 Mary looked in the mirror. She was in the last bloom of her good looks. It was Indian summer. Lodged somewhere deep in those hair follicles and joints, there was the knowledge that the beautiful auburn hair would soon go gray and her skin would get looser as her mother's had before her. This knowledge that time, even with its softest velvet gloves, would deal her a blow, lent depth to her presence. It gave her a long, beautiful shadow. But that was for others to enjoy.
For her it was painful to apprehend that the last embers of youth will evaporate as sure as the leaves change color in the fall. Just like that, Mary then sat down at the computer terminal and took out the last $2,000 from her home equity line. With a few keystrokes she exhausted a binge that started years earlier. The runaway financial freight train that carried $187,000 a long time ago finally came to a dead stop holding zero.
In the meantime, her NJ home once valued at $525,000 had now dropped to $450,000. It is not as though she did not know this was coming. On the contrary, she pondered her fate from the moment she unlocked this devil's chest of treasure. This Faustian bargain with the banks helped her live like a good citizen. Whatever deficit she had at the end of the month would come out of her equity line and like that almost by magic her bills were paid every month. Mary, 40 and smart, was promised by "Life" that she would be forever ensconced in the ranks of the middle class. That meant, a leased Toyota minivan, good health insurance, graduate school education for her and for her kids, money to fix the crack in the driveway and to paint the porch every few years - a 401k and a few thousand in a money market fund.
She was far from reckless. In fact, over the years she had even trained herself to do with less. She had gotten control of most of her vices with help of 12-step and a good therapist. She lived the rules of life expounded by the Big Book. But a depleted credit line of $187K? How had things come to this? Why with a good husband who had a not-great, but solid job, did her financial life look like a ghost ship? She was a tenured university professor and yet she felt as though she were being buried alive in a tomb of debt.
Oh yes, she was in good company for sure. The economy was going to pieces, the housing bubble, the credit crunch, high unemployment. In her academic office, in between grading papers, she searched for a reason. Was her situation inevitable? Mary was a professor of history and History she had of late come to understand, was not a succession of predetermined rises and falls as some believed, but rather the end product of a series of smaller decisions made by blind, sleeping actors. Could Mary awaken herself, she wondered.
Mary's father had been a professor of biochemistry. He had taught her that scholarship was salvation. Any problem at all could be studied and a solution identified and found. He would argue this with friends when they were young in the 1970s. Her parents, the upper froth of the 60s generation, got together with their friends on Sundays during the oil shocks of the 1970s to reason the world. By Mary's lights, these "reasoning sessions" accomplished very little, but they did seem an effective vehicle for peacock strutting and general kitchen flirtations while the kids watched TV. Mary's father could not seem to put wheels under his own carriage and died unfulfilled in mid-paragraph, with many-a-dream unfulfilled, the never-published book, under-challenged and under-used and under-powered.
But still, her father's approach could be taken further. You could become a scholar of your own, a wise-man of your own reservation. For years Mary had been a professor of history, but she could become a professor of finance - the finances of her own life. When there is a money problem, she reasoned, we logically think of jobs, but for most of history, people did not have jobs at all. They were employed by the land. They were farmers. But what if you thought of yourself as a farmer of your own soil, the little patch of land called the mind or the brain?
She studied herself again in the mirror. Where to begin?
A friend of hers advised: Think of all the ways big and small in which you avoid reality - this will lead to answers. Reality may be your best friend, he said.
And so, Mary went out into the world...
