Under-Employed and the Holidays

  We had spent a wonderful Thanksgiving Day in NYC viewing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and celebrating with generous new friends in their lovely home.  But Black Friday hit me like a ton of bricks in the Bed Bath and Beyond Lincoln Center.

  Jordan innocently enough said that she wanted to stop by the Bed Bath and  Beyond to buy a Yankee Candle to bring the smell of cinnamon and pine to our apartment. This store is a gem in the heart of Manhattan with amazingly reasonably priced items, so it wasn't city merchant greed that struck me or the fact that Cameron was loading the cart with lights and decorations for the season.  We still have a storage locker full of our stuff back in Denver, including 23 years worth of Christmas decorations. Because of the uncertainty of Cameron's high school prospects and my lack of job opportunities we have opted to leave our things there instead of incurring the additional cost of shipping everything out here with the possibility of sending them back in less than a year. I have told the girls that we will need to buy a few key items to decorate our humble abode and make it feel like home, so Cam was just following the plan and stocking up on the essential lights and jingle bell wreaths needed for a traditional Christmas.

  I am at the end of month three in the job search. Nothing.  I have had several interviews that I was either abundantly qualified for or obscenely over qualified for, but the call backs never came. Before we moved to New York I watched the news and intellectually understood the unemployment problem.  In Evergreen we sold our house, so I certainly understood the crashing housing market and the fragile economy.  But I never imagined that someone with my work history would not be able to find a job.  Our budget is tight, but it makes sense as long as no unexpected expenses come up.  (this is the part where I encourage uncontrollable laughter)  Needless to say Hunter's college budget was under estimated, his ability to contribute to car payments was overestimate, Jordan's slower than expected jump into the skilled/degreed work force, and my inability to find a well paying job has brought our budget to a bottle neck.

  Back to Bed Bath and Beyond. So... Cam is filling the cart with Christmas decorations.  My mind is racing with the budget.  We have just enough to pay the bills and cover weekly living expenses.  No extras. NO EXTRAS.  No Christmas wreaths. or candles, or cards, or lights, etc... How do I tell my 13 year old daughter that we went from being a family on a life style budget to a family that cannot buy a thing beyond the weekly grocery budget. I literally felt the walls close in.  The two boxes of Christmas lights ($6.99 each) the bell wreath ($12.00 each), and Sparking Christmas Tree Yankee Candle ($24 each) literally choked me. I looked at the shoppers next to me carefully putting items into their baskets and I saw my reflection from seasons past buying with Christams joy, and here I was walking with a basket that I could not afford to even push through the store.  It was humbling and overwhelming.

  The city has been so good to us.  We have an apartment literally on the doorstep of the Upper West Side, Cameron has been embraced by her fellow students at a sought after middle school in the neighborhood, we have navigated our way to the coolest things the city has to offer for free (concerts in the park, free museum tickets, and fixed priced restaurant menus), and yet I cannot find a job.  The nightmare of selling the house and the unknown of moving to a destination with no one to greet us at the other end seem marginalized by the fact that I cannot find work.  As I mentioned in an earlier piece, I do have a job.   But I am under paid and over qualified.  At 49 I have become part of the invisible middle aged work force. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of believe, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."

  But quoting Dickens to your 13 year old is a rather grand ideal in the middle of a big box store.  We left. And when we got to the sidewalk she squeezed my hand and said, "Let's just take a walk through the Park today."  I fought back the tears and we headed into Central Park to shuffle through the autumn leaves.