They came to me in the middle of the night. They were young and beautiful and dressed up like they were about to go out. I had about an hour’s warning, and their knock on the door was light so as to wake no one who wasn’t already up. When they got to my doorstep, I was ready. I knew it would be hasty and impromptu, but there’s no reason even a simple wedding can’t be beautiful.

We shared grapes and wine, and I told them that what begins as new and perfect fruit can end up a rich, fermented, much-changed substance that the vine might not recognize. They tasted both and said their vows, and we signed the paperwork. With a little help from their friends, they were married.

In the state of California, any recognized member of the church clergy can marry individuals to one another if the couple has a license. Over the years, I’ve married a handful of couples in the woods and in my living room. I’ve seen the state and the nation struggle over the definition of marriage, and I’ve seen it take many forms. I’ve heard the academic and feminist arguments that marriage was, for many centuries, a primarily economic arrangement to secure the merging and inheritance of property. Much about marriage has changed, but for the very rich and the very poor, the economic part remains the same.

The rich have assets to protect. They draw up contracts and agreements to ensure no one is seduced into a holy and blissful union by a heartless and calculating gold digger.

The poor have other arrangements to make. We are more likely to cohabitate to save money, whether it is appropriate for the relationship or not. In my life, I have known men and women who choose to stay with partners who are abusive or merely unsuited because breaking up means giving up a place to call home.

My friends who were married that night in my living room loved one another and probably would have chosen to marry at some point. The reason they came to me with so little notice, however, was not a pregnancy or a shotgun or even a romantic whim. It was the deadline for FAFSA submissions for the following academic year. Too young to be considered independent from their parents, they were desperate for enough financial aid to transfer to a four-year university. They were the children of vanishing middle class. On paper, their folks could afford to contribute to their tuition, but real life is complicated with gambling addictions and jobs that don’t offer health care.

It wasn’t young love. It wasn’t an impetuous gesture or an adherence to belief. It was a financial decision. Like many decisions forced upon us by poverty, it was a decision that puts the future in jeopardy — no money down, crippling credit terms down the road. The FAFSA considers married students independent and places a student in a wholly separate category for aid. Choosing to marry now to qualify for aid may result in a possibly messy and potentially expensive divorce later, but in the moment, we do what we must. In the meantime, we give one another the gift of an education otherwise out of reach.

Tuition has outpaced the cost of living, outpaced inflation and shows no sign of slowing. People all over are taking drastic measures to afford school, and at the University of California, we are no different. A recent discussion on the cost of housing led some of my classmates to speculate on the appearance of quad dorms with four bunks to a room and the feasibility of (not kidding) camping on the Glade and writing a blog called The Great Outdorms. The idea of getting married for mercenary causes may rankle the romantic soul, but in the scheme of desperation, it seems almost a tame solution.

In my tradition, couples being wed grasp hands and are gently tied together to symbolize their bond. When this couple was tied, I told them to remember that it’s only one hand they’ve given and that the other remains free. True of their marriage, this also became a symbol of their shared commitment to helping one another get through school, support one another’s dreams and be good partners; they were not entirely bound, but they were also not entirely free.

Marriage was never pure. It is sometimes undertaken in the spirit of perfect altruism and true love, but my friends’ practical decision was perfectly in line with the long and fraught history of this evolving institution. They might have given up, waited a few years or taken on crushing loans to move forward with their education. A license to marry costs $97 and takes effect the moment both people say “I do.” They’re responsible to one another and for one another, and they take that seriously. This year, they’ll both graduate from a UC school with their respective bachelor’s degrees.

I now pronounce you educated to the minimum degree necessary to get a decent job.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post For richer or for poorer appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Corn tortillas were being warmed over an open gas burner, perfuming the kitchen with that taco night scent. A simmering pan bubbled and spat, and I spotted a mounded bowl of shredded jack cheese. Tomatoes, lettuce and onions were arranged like birthday balloons in bright colors, and bottle of crema with a Spanish label lorded over it all, the white-robed lord of the condiments.

I was spending the night at a friend’s, and I was very excited. We had played for hours, and when her mom finally called us in for dinner, we were starving. There was an assembly line, and we could make our own meals. I got to the pan full of shredded beef and looked at it for a minute before getting nudged to get a move on. I was polite and didn’t say anything, but I was very confused.

When I got home, I asked my mom about it.

“So I spent the night over at Yesenia’s.”

“Yeah, I know you did. I met her mom.”

“Her mom made tacos, but she didn’t put any potatoes in the meat.”

“No kidding.”

“It’s like they weren’t even real tacos.”

She laughed a little and sat me down for one of the first adult conversations of my life.

My mom raised four kids on her own. She worked retail jobs and drove broken-down cars, but we never went hungry. She just got creative. Whenever she made beef, she explained to me that she could extend it with potatoes. They were filling, they’d soak up the flavor of the meat and they cost pennies to keep in the pantry. The more recipes she mentioned, the more I realized that she loaded all of my favorite dinners with the cheapest grains and produce she could find to make more out of less. Cabbage rolls with rice and carrots. Meatloaf that was more than half tomatoes and bread crumbs. Dark meat chicken and the heels of rye bread.

Up until I was 12 years old, I thought fettuccine Alfredo was just buttered noodles with pepper. My mom joked that she never cooked more than a pound of ground beef, even when the table was set for eight.

Poor doesn’t always mean going hungry. There is legitimate hunger in this country, but most of America’s poor suffer from a lack of options. People who grew up like me, on rice and bread and potatoes and convenience food, weren’t starving — we were slowly developing diabetes and gout. Our eating habits were formed early, and I still note the price of ramen noodles, holding steady at four for a dollar in my neighborhood store. However, I am trying to learn from the examples set for me by both Lil Wayne and Junot Diaz. I am trying to retain the parts of my identity that were forged by being poor while shedding the bad habits of poverty. My stories come with me, but the ramen and the purple drank have to be left behind.

The national debate about childhood obesity and the eating habits of the very poor isn’t just political. It’s deeply personal. I remember my friends in grade school who ate uncooked ramen sprinkled with the super-salty flavor packet for lunch every day. Not some days, not bad days, but every day. I remember living in a food desert and choosing between dinner at 7-Eleven or Pizza Hut about five nights a week. My mom made the best choices that she could, but there’s no denying that there is a great deal of privilege that can be read in our diets.

Living in the Bay Area, we have access to a great deal of local and imported produce. We can buy organic every day if we choose — and if we can afford it. Restaurants in this area are prepared to answer questions about the origin of ingredients, methods of preparation and even the moral philosophies of how and why they cook what they cook. Our options are numerous; our standards are high. This is the privilege of people who aren’t too hungry to worry about it.

When I visited home this summer, I could see I wasn’t the only one moving on. Like many women who had children when they were very young, my mom is still growing up and still finding herself. I opened the freezer, expecting the 19-cent burritos I grew up on, but I found it full of frozen quartered squash, my mom’s homemade chicken stock for soup and a couple of whole free-range chickens. She’s stopped using anything processed or artificial in her cooking, and she’s not scrambling to feed a bunch of kids anymore. We’ve both changed our circumstances enough that our choices are dictated by what we like rather than what’s cheapest.

We went out to dinner together and talked about what’s changed, and I think she said it best.

“When you kids were growing up, if we went out, I could only look at the right side of the menu, where the prices were printed. Now I only look left.”

We think back, we look left, we look forward. We keep the good and leave the ramen on the shelf.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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My best friend’s parents both went to Cal. Some of her earliest memories are of the Campanile and the Cal Band performances, and she was very excited to come visit me when I started here. When we were preparing to graduate from high school, her parents really wanted her to follow in their footsteps and stay in California. She got into Cal, but she wanted to do something different from what they had done.

She got her letter from Georgetown University and took off across the country. I remember watching the whole process of her applications, her worrying and her excitement as acceptance letters came in. We were the same age, and I should have been doing the same thing. She and I are different in a lot of ways, and having two Cal alumni for parents is just one of the ways in which she had an advantage. After she left for Washington, D.C., I went to work and did what most people do when they don’t go to college. I learned the value of lost time the hard way, by punching a clock and sacrificing potential for survival. I did not figure out how to follow her for almost 10 years.

When I was new at UC Berkeley, I was really hoping to meet people who came from a life like I had come from. I remembered the statistics from CalSO about the percentage of students who received financial aid, and I thought I’d meet lots of people who had grown up poor. I thought about everyone who had stood when we were asked to stand if we were first-generation college students. Despite my expectations, many of the people I meet at Cal are like my best friend: Their parents went to college or at least stressed it to them early in life.

Sometime in the last year, I’ve stopped comparing my journey to theirs. I stopped wondering how things might have been different if I had been born to somebody else. What matters is what I’ve got and what I do with it now, because I can’t go back. Although my parents aren’t college graduates, I’ve inherited other gifts.

My mom is very smart. She is ultrasupportive of my siblings and me pursuing our educations. As I’ve grown up and learned and changed, she’s been my biggest fan. She understands the value of education — that’s not an issue. She can read a stranger’s face perfectly, and she makes business deals and handles money in a take-no-prisoners way that she’s always referred to as “Jesse James-ing.” She’s cunning and quick and very creative when she chooses to be. She did not, however, go to college. She dropped out of high school, like me. Unlike me, she immediately got pregnant and had three kids whom she had to support and raise almost totally on her own. The path of her life has not yet led back to school.

The difference of growing up poor and raised by people who didn’t go to college is one that is hard to communicate. My friend on Sproul Plaza was told her whole life about college, both as a concept and as a reality. Her parents told stories about it, derived who they are from it and probably expected her and her siblings to go without question. Growing up without those stories and that expectation is a disadvantage, no question.

However, the almost insurmountable obstacle comes from not knowing the process. Parents who did not go to college don’t know when you should take the SAT or how to fill out applications. They may or may not be willing or able to provide their kids with the information on income that they’ll need to apply for both admission and aid. They are far less likely to arrange campus field trips or even talk about where and how the process began. Counselors are overtaxed and underpaid in high schools all over the country.

So we fly blind.

Shortly after I went back to school, I brought home a friend for dinner. My mom is the most generous and welcoming of hostesses, and she was no less so to my new friend. Over dinner, my friend and I got into a spirited discussion on what we thought was the best treatment of the Arthurian legend in literature: “Le Morte d’Arthur” or “Idylls of the King.” We went back and forth for a long time, shutting everyone else out of the conversation. When she could get a word in, my mom interjected: “I like Ziggy — sometimes Calvin and Hobbes, but Ziggy is the best.” I realized then that keeping my mom in the conversation was not just something I needed to do to be polite. I was moving to a foreign country called Academia, and if I forgot how to speak the language we used at home, I’d lose her, too. Bridging the gap within my family between education levels isn’t easy. For people who come to UC Berkeley broke, sometimes the steepest learning curve is outside the classroom.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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Maen Mahfoud/Staff

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