First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Daily Life

Pay Day

April 15, 2013 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

It’s tax day, and I’m ready to honor my commitment.

As promised, here’s the winning entry for our contest, What’s Your Splurge?  

I would take my mother to the Blue Ridge Mountains for an entire summer. She is in her 60s and still clocking 60-70 hour weeks at the inner-city school she has been working at for almost five years. She purposefully chose to transfer from a school with more resources to this school to help build a community of compassionate scholars in a part of town most people would rather forget exists at all. She works really hard and is there from early in the morning to late at night, she brings lunches for her students who do not have any, she encourages them to never settle, to always work hard and think hard and be of service–all without ever complaining about the millions of completely legitimate complaints she and every teacher could easily verbalize due to inadequate funding, teaching to a test, etc.  Anyway, because of all of this, I would whisk her (and my amazingly talented sister who is also a teacher) away to my mother’s favorite place for the summer: the Blue Ridge Mountains, somewhere within driving distance of DC for days in town. We would stay in a cozy cabin with a big kitchen and lots of windows and a porch with comfy chairs so we could all sit in the sun and read and doze and look at the mountains.

Congratulations, Kaye!! You’ll be receiving a copy of the Tenth of December by George Saunders. And as a special treat, we’ll be sending along an extra copy of the book for your inspirational mother.

Thanks to all who entered. May your splurges come true.

Barrels of Money by Victor Dubreuil

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