In the summer of 1997, I clipped a comic strip from the newspaper. The strip was “B.C.,” then drawn by Johnny Hart. The characters in the strip were cavemen, and the themes regularly invoked Mr. Hart’s religious views. The one I carry was part of an ongoing story where one of the cavemen was floating on a tiny raft with a crab. The raft was barely large enough to hold the caveman, the post with a sail, and a box against which the caveman was resting his head. The crab was in a crow’s nest that looked like a flowerpot mounted atop the pole. In the first panel, the caveman wants to know whether there’s any land in sight, and the crab, showing optimism, says, “Not yet.” Then the caveman complains about how the crab is no good and how he (the caveman) is starving to death. The crab reprimands him and in the final frame, it says, “Have hope—provision will come.” The caveman demands, “. . . And just who is going to provide?” Then, as a fish jumps from the water into the box, a voice from above proclaims “I AM.”

I’ve carried this clipping in my day planner for nearly twenty-eight years. During the inevitable lean times in the life of a freelancer, the strip has reminded me that provision will indeed come. And it always has, ever since the end of May, 1997, when I left a full-time job with a regular salary, paid time off, health insurance, and employer contributions (albeit minimal) to my retirement account. I had one client, a box of business cards, and a book entitled, Money-Smart Secrets for the Self-Employed, by Linda Stern.

Twenty-eight years. So far, so good.

Mind you, those were relatively sane years for the country. Not everything went well, of course, but things were calm enough that we had the luxury of getting worked up about whether the president had had an extramarital affair with an intern. The dotcom bubble was just getting started. The attorney general was Janet Reno, the secretary of state was Madeleine Albright, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second female Supreme Court justice. It was a good time for a clueless youngish lawyer who had no safety net—no spouse with a job and health insurance, no alimony, no trust fund, nothing but a computer and a pair of cats—to take a leap into the unknown.

I know people still do things like this, but I don’t know where they find the courage, especially in this economy. I know that God still provides, but from month to month, I spend more time than ever fretting over billable hours and running the calculations to ensure that all the expenses can be met. I routinely pause before using a credit card, debating whether to wait until after this billing cycle closes to make a particular purchase in order to postpone the day I’ll have to pay for it. Last summer, I had some extra money, and I was all set to finally replace the kitchen floor I’ve hated for twenty-five years. Then, I cracked a tooth, and the floor money went to pay for a crown. I knew enough to be grateful that I was able to pay the dentist, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed anyway, because I have no idea when—or if—that opportunity will come my way again.

Sometimes I think that it’s not the era as such—it’s just me getting older. With age comes some maturity after all. In my younger years, I assumed that credit card debt was just a normal part of life. It didn’t occur to me that avoidable debt was a bad idea and that I should take steps to reduce or even eliminate it. When I was still with my old firm, I used to count on my year-end bonus to pay off whatever cards had balances, and that seemed a perfectly fine way to live at the time.

It wasn’t until I was self-employed that it occurred to me that I should make an effort to invest for retirement. In candor, I did it less because of a concern for the future than because a self-employed friend had mentioned that the funds could be pre-tax contributions that would reduce the amount of tax I had to pay now. I had miniscule accounts from former employers that I rolled over, and ever so slowly, I learned to set aside funds for my annual contributions. Now, nearly thirty years later, when the ridiculous shenanigans of the current regime continue to slash the funds which are meant to be paying my way in the not-too-distant future, I want to write a letter to those fooligans and demand that they replace the money their idiocy has cost me.

I used to envy my retired friends their spare time. They relaxed and played and traveled and took life easy, or so it seemed. Now, I admire their courage for retiring at all, for walking away from a reasonably sure source of income before they had to (because let’s face it, practically every job seems vulnerable these days). I’m not at all certain I’ll ever be brave enough to retire completely, to close down my primary source of income and say, “That’s all, folks.” More likely, there will come a day when all of my clients will have retired, died, or gone on the bench. (So far, I’ve had clients do all of the above.) Or enough of them will do so that my earnings from the legal work will no longer pay for the expenses (legal database and professional liability insurance), and that will be my cue to shut down. At that point, my income sources will be social security (please, God) and whatever is left in my retirement account after the present imbeciles have run the financial system into the ground, and those monies will need to cover everything from food to shelter to health care (yikes!).

It is in these moments when I think with a certain awe of that naïve younger woman who leapt into the abyss of self-employment because one day, she saw an ad in the job book at the law school career office. The ad was placed by a local lawyer who was looking for someone to do research and writing 25 hours per week. The woman read the ad and thought, “Too bad I can’t get a bunch of these gigs and string them together.”

She might have left it at that, except that she wasn’t that far removed from the even younger, more naïve woman who had lunch with a lawyer who was leaving private practice to become a prosecutor because it was what he’d always wanted to do, and when she thought, “Why does he get to do what he always wanted to do and I don’t?”, in the next instant the response came: “Who says you don’t?” And so that young woman did research and took the LSAT and applied to law schools and did everything else she needed to do, which is how she grew into the one who sat in the career office looking at that ad and knew she could string together a bunch of those gigs, or at least she could try to, because who says you can’t?

Have hope, provision will come.

In the early summer of 1997 when my new business was slow, provision was my downstairs neighbor coming home from work on the last day of the school year. She worked in the cafeteria of a local elementary school, and she said they’d been told to take whatever perishables they wanted. So she showed up at my door with a foil-wrapped bundle of long, skinny hot dogs and several half-pints of milk, both white and chocolate. The hot dogs went into my freezer, and they were my dinner several times over the course of that first summer. The white milk doused my breakfast cereal, and the chocolate was a periodic treat.

I don’t know what form provision will take as we all grapple with the uncertainties inflicted by this regime. But here’s what I do know. Provision can happen in the most unexpected ways. We can be provision for each other. It might be hands-on, like taking someone food or offering a ride, or it might involve referring them to potential clients or employers or resources, sharing their information on social media so others can learn what they have to offer, or even simply reaching out to let them know someone cares.  

I can’t make any guarantees for you. I can’t make any guarantees, period. That’s above my pay grade. All I can tell you is that in 28 years, provision has always come in one form or another. Not always as quickly or abundantly as I might have liked, or in the form I might have chosen—but always, it has come. To me, that’s a pretty good track record.

Have hope, the crab said. Provision will come.