Open Letter To the Person Who Stole My Wallet Yesterday

Dear Sir or Madam,

Most of all, I really hope you enjoyed reading all those fortune cookie fortunes I collected over the years, perhaps while you were waiting in line at Target with my credit card in hand and maybe two dozen sheet sets and a bunch of DVDs on the conveyor belt. You seem like the type to hunt without a license, but just in case, I stuck a blank jackalope hunting license in there just for you! It's been signed by the mayor of Douglas, Wyoming, so just fill in your name and you should be good to go! I also hope that you take the opportunity to drive down to Urbana and eat four more meals at Basil Thai. Your fifth will be free.

Then, while you're lying in front of the fire on your jackalope skin rug, eating fried rice and watching the complete Friends, consider taking a moment to look at the wallet itself. It might not be your style--pink with red poppies on it--and at first I wasn't even sure it was my style, but I bought it in one of my favorite cities in the world and it held everything. It became my style, because it was my wallet and I liked it better than all the other wallets people gave me over the years, the ones that languished in my top drawer (well, aside from the replacement I whipped out yesterday) untouched.

You're mostly welcome to the cash in there, even though I was planning on spending the forty bucks at the grocery store today. Perhaps your need is greater than mine and you have children or nieces and nephews who could use a good meal. That part is fine. What isn't okay is the rest of the money in there, which my mother handed me when I left Kansas on Thursday. She told me to buy myself a nice outfit I could feel good wearing on my first day of work, which is tomorrow.

Now, I don't have the world's largest bank account, but I have enough that, if I wanted, I could go out and buy an outfit today anyway. After all, I left my debit card in my apartment for the first time this year out of some strange, premonitory luck and I have it with me now (in my new, perfectly nice, substandard wallet). It's not the money. Money is money. I have a job and my mom has a job and my dad gets retirement checks. What really bothers me to the point that it makes my skin crawl and my tear ducts fire up is that my mother, who loves me and wanted me to have a good first day at work because I've had a not-bad-but-not-easy year, handed it to me and I took it out of her hands and put it in my wallet and the next hands to take it out were...not mine. I wasn't standing in Express, and my mother's idea was temporarily hijacked by someone she would probably call "sad," "unfortunate," "an interesting adult."

So think of me in line at the DMV tomorrow morning, while I hope against hope that they can get me a new driver's license as quickly as possible so I don't have to call in late on my first day. And think of me the next time you access any of the services available to you as someone who has gotten to the point that you feel you must steal for a living, because somewhere someone is writing grants to keep those services available to you, and they might be doing it with a new (substandard) wallet in their purse.

Enjoy those CVS and Dominick's discounts!
Sincerely,
Nom de Plume

In Which I Am Claire Fisher

When I left work on June 29th and drove to my hometown (now finally revealed as Champaign, Illinois), I left work for the last time. On my last day, the kids threw a party. They wrote cards and hung streamers and made little protest signs out of Popsicle sticks urging me not to go. They girls created a stepping routine and performed a poem they had written to go with it. M, my coworker, ordered pizza and cake.

It's been a tough year, and one I would not care to repeat, but it has changed me in ways I wouldn't trade for anything and on my last day I felt very loved. To repay some of the kindness that was done to me by welcoming me to the Center, I gave each of the kids one of my books, carefully selected to match their personalities and needs from among the stack of books deaccessioned from my childhood library. FP, who is a quiet, deep-thinking writer, got a hardcover book of poetry. FJ, who I wouldn't be surprised to find myself working for one day, got Julie of the Wolves. Two of the boys, best friends and artists, got Dinotopia and The World Beneath. AP got Harriet the Spy. Her brother got Captain Underpants. And on and on and on. Since my precocity had limits, I went ahead and bought two Anna Deavere Smith books for the girls in the evening program who worked with me to write the play.

I think I may do more for literacy at the Center by my absence than by my presence, as I'm given to understand that letters may already be on their way to me in the mail.

I'm not going far. After taking July to help my parents move, I will be returning to the Center (different site, same organization) as a grant-writer. I'm happy because I'm not leaving entirely; I'll still have to opportunity to see the kids and coworkers I'll miss the most. It'll be very different, though. I'll have a desk, a computer, a filing cabinet, a phone extension, and a boss who checks in with me regularly. I'll have working adult hours. It'll be stressful, but not in the way this year has been. It'll be challenging, but on a professional and not a basic, personal level. I will miss those deep-digging revelations about the world and myself that I had on an almost weekly basis, but I won't miss the time I snatched scissors out of a girl's hand, or the time I had to break up a rapidly escalating fight, or the time there were shots fired outside the school where we did pickup, or those times I kept it together at work only to burst into tears on Lake Shore Drive on the way home.

But, wait, how am I Claire Fisher, youngest Fisher child and red-haired heroine of HBO's Six Feet Under? I have blogged before about my passing resemblance to Roland Pryzbylewski. Now, and not for the first time, I feel myself identifying with Claire, who is semi-catapulted into adulthood as she drives away from the place that has been her house for years while "Breathe Me" by Sia plays in the background.

Claire and I have very little in common in the grand scheme of things, but while I was driving away from Chicago to Champaign where I would spend one night with my best friend's family before embarking on my parents' big move the next day, "Breathe Me" shuffled its way onto my iPod. I found myself thinking of Claire, whose creative struggles I took to heart at the beginning of my time at the Center. "Maybe you're not an artist," her aunt says to her, and she gets really offended, because she knows fundamentally that she is but with every passing day she has less proof. She tries a job that isn't her before finding one that is, but going for it requires a big leap of faith. She leaves her home, and she's uncertain but she's hopeful.

I've found that dealing with uncertainty in one area of your life narrows your focus in others. You start to think of what's really important to you. You may not act on it immediately, but at least you know. Working with the kids at the Center changed my setting just as saying goodbye to "home" changed my setting, but these things also made me more myself. More experiences. More growth. More challenges. More people to identify with.