He wasn’t anyone I expected. He was someone I’d lost track of an entire decade ago.
My children were too embarrassed to come.
I’m Dana. I’m 62 years old. And when people expected me to stay home and knit sweaters for my grandchildren, I enrolled in college.
I’d wanted to be a teacher since I was a teenager, back when that dream still felt like something simple and obvious.
Then my father got sick the year I graduated high school, and the medical bills swallowed whatever savings my family had.
My dream ended before it ever began.
I enrolled in college.
I took a job in the school cafeteria to help my mother keep the lights on, telling myself it was temporary, the way you tell yourself a lot of things in your eighteenth year that turn out to last considerably longer than you planned.
