Bread and soup and salad will be my menu for Thanksgiving, following an afternoon at work, at time-and-a-half pay. My dinner menu will be a little austere because I lost my wallet last week, with most of my ID, ATM and credit cards, and my EBT card. The credit and debit cards were replaced in a few days, along with a new social security card and a temporary driver's license, but the EBT card is still in the mail (this is the magic plastic that replaces the old paper food stamps, in case anyone doesn't recognize the acronym). I'm very glad that I was carrying my keys and bus pass in my pockets, so I was able to get home and indoors on a cold, rainy evening. Would have been an utterly miserable experience otherwise.
Losses like this sometimes leave me considering how slight a person's hold on their place in the world can be. I've felt this after losing jobs, and during my landlord troubles, every time I came home to find another notice posted on my door, and especially the evening I came home from work to find the lock had been changed.
And those little paper and plastic bits with the numbers and ciphers are like keys that you need to get and keep your place. I've often felt that with no job and no home, I'd be a nobody from nowhere, and without my cards and papers there would be no chance of coming back.
Sometimes I brood and worry too much and get myself into an awful state, but with the holidays coming up, I want to ask everyone who hasn't (yet) experienced any of this, to please for a little while try to imagine yourself displaced from everything you own and do, from every place you felt welcome, with no job title, no bank accounts or paychecks, no place to sleep, no car or phone or email. And then remember not to judge people who are going without these things.
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