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Mr. Mack – Long Road to Greatness

Before Wall Street became the face of American wealth, it was the site of a slave market. Black bodies were bought, sold, and collateralized, right where the New York Stock Exchange stands today. Generational wealth started here. Generational pain did too. That’s the foundation of the American economy.

I Have Become the Rich Relative I Always Wanted

When I was but a wee baby bitch, penniless and loaded down with student loans, I used to wish I had some rich relative to swoop in and solve all my money problems.

I’m not sure where I got the yearning for a rich relative. I could blame books like Little Women for putting the hope of discovering an Old Mister Laurence into my preadolescent head. (Or even an Aunt March! I’d settle for an Aunt March!) Mr. Brewer in The Babysitter’s Club was not only an engaged and loving father-figure to Kristy, but a walking plot device to ensure all the Babysitters could go on bookworthy adventures together.

Pop culture told me that a rich relative was my birthright, as a bossy yet pure-hearted tomboy. And as I got older, I saw for myself that this character was anything but fictional.

I went to an expensive private college. (It was the style at the time.) Many students came from modest middle-class backgrounds, like myself. But some came from, shall we say, means. They’d casually reveal that their car was a graduation present from an aunt, or that their student loans were “handled” by their grandfather.

One of my college friends was invited to join a chill vacation to a cousin’s cabin in Montana. Wanting to visit a western state, and enthusiastically prepared to rough it, she agreed. She was picked up at the airport by a helicopter. As the helicopter skated over clouded hilltops, pine forests, and clear blue lakes, my friend asked when they would reach the fabled cousin’s place. “Oh, this is it,” her host said, casually waving her hand over the entirety of the Bob Ross painting below them. The “cousin’s cabin” turned out to be a private hunting lodge of unparalleled luxury, situated on hundreds of acres of pristine wilderness, with full-time staff. She spent the week in a very comfortable class daze, like a romance novel heroine.

So I knew that these people were not only theoretically possible. They walked among us! And what I wanted from mine felt so much more reasonable than a palatial lodge with a private staff.

If fairy godmothers exist, where the hell is mine?! (keep reading)

This land passed to me now, where the trees being older than me is no feat. Everything here is. The house, the paths, the grass, every plant, and especially those trees.

I’ve been told this land was a Christmas tree farm before the house was build in the 1950s. My family came along soon after that. My mom sat under the maple in the front yard, a perfect nook for her doll house to sit and a lovely patch of shade for her and her pet rabbit to play. She and her sisters all labored in the yard under their parents’ watchful eyes, just like I can still imagine them watching me to this day.

My grandfather planted these maples around us. Each sapling, he would find a home for in this yard or his daughter’s yards until they could hold no more. I can’t be upset sweeping up the maple seeds when I know how he valued each small part of his trees.

There were seven pines of my childhood. There were six sugar maples. Two pines we all loved came down when I was just a child, and the way my cousins tell it I sobbed through that day. Two maple trees were lost beyond repair last summer, through the roof and fence and we hurt for those things my grandfather had built. Another maple and a pine both leaned in too close to the family home as if they didn’t already know the secrets it had to share this summer. It felt like losing family, more family, as my grandfather passed so recently, as they went. In every storm I wonder which of them may have fallen onto my bedroom, if they ever really could hurt me given my roots and theirs. We won’t ever know if their lives saved mine.

I wonder if the ones still standing blame us. I wonder what they would think being left behind with so many sister trees decorated and discarded so many decades ago. I wonder if they are happy to still have four of their sisters standing tall so close, and seeing more so close by. None stand as tall as our pines here, and I have to wonder if our love and care made this difference.