Rachel Dovey

He ran for local office soon before I left, outlining a plan to set up drivers’ license checkpoints around the city for anyone whose truck contained gardening tools.

This was 1998, and the Friends’ cushy lifestyle still looked attainable. There was no war (that we were aware of in rural California), no $13 trillion dollar deficit, no 9.2% unemployment rate, no housing collapse. We lived in a Disneyland of sub-prime mortgages and college loans, APR financing and shopping malls and our Boomer parents waved their magic Mastercards and told us that, someday, we could be anything we chose.