I didn’t just work in the grocery store. I juggled three jobs: crew member, online grading, and regional coordinator for two branches of a community college writing center. I’d quit the grocery store for an emergency teaching job—a long-time adjunct there had burnt out and quit, taking what he’d saved to be a writer—but I kept the writing center and the grading, just in case. As hard as that semester was—the long commutes to teach and tutor, in opposite directions from one another, the slow enveloping approach of winter, the long, sleepless nights—I made the right call about sacrificing for all that work: before “Three Miles” first aired, my spring classes had been cut in half, and they told me I’d be lucky to teach at all the next fall.
          My son Owen was almost six months old.
          Trader Joe’s had, after all, been my neighborhood store; when I’d come back shopping I’d tell my co-workers what I’d left for, but I’d say teaching—not adjuncting—and how proud I was to be in front of a classroom again. I knew my position was precarious. I think about the ‘crew member’ title used at Trader Joe’s, a bit of narrative ornamentation tying us to our chain’s nautical theme, and the titles of ‘reporter’ or ‘producer.’ It is a brittle irony that many public radio employees also work contract to contract, with even less security than contingent faculty, with far less security than grocery store employees. They tackle stories of national import, and deep human connection, fortunate most of all I assume, if their bosses have the same aspirations to compassion that they demonstrate in their reporting.
           Eventually, we moved across the country for my spouse Lauren’s work, and in the years since, I earned a PhD. When I started writing this essay I juggled four jobs: writing center tutor, weekend desk attendant for a local museum, teaching poetry to kids and memoir to seniors. Sometimes I’d pick up gig-work tutoring online, but even surge pricing barely added up.
          Eight years after I left the grocery store for an emergency full-time adjunct position at a rural college, I did the same in Texas, with the same results. After a semester of work, I was told my position had been transformed, cut into several smaller part-time positions. Those jobs had already been posted—a month before—but I could still apply.
          “Three Miles” re-aired a few years ago; Lauren found it comical how obsessed I was with the whole grocery store aspect, which is really not what the show is ‘about.’ As a college graduate I am more than twice as likely to be middle-class, married, healthy, to enjoy my daily work, as the reporter points out, and Lauren reminded me.
          But the grocery store also means more than it’s taken for: health insurance and flexibility, stability, safe working conditions, interesting and diverse co-workers, sometimes unionized or nice enough compared to the alternatives. More than a week off when a child is born. Many of my friends remain at the grocery store, some of them plan to leave, some to make careers, some are just hustling, trying to figure out what’s next. I can say the same for many of my fellow PhDs.
          Everything I’ve done since the grocery store paid better. And yet, when my son was born I was back teaching as soon as they let us out of the hospital. This notion that education will save us, and for what, and to what end…I’m not so sure.

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          Marty didn’t have a side hustle or a belabored academic career, and when I asked him before the interview how he liked to define himself, he said he would prefer not to.
          Giving Marty a ride home, he said he didn’t know he had it in him to say the thing I’d quoted in the poem. When we parked outside the house he shared with his sister and mother, Marty told me about how bad his semi-annual employee review went; he watched me lean close, listening hard. Marty, it turned out, was chastised for informing an order-writer that Belgian chocolate pudding moved next to broccoli florets “makes absolutely zero sense.” At his review he was told he had been discourteous with management; they didn’t like his attitude.
          “That one’s on the house,” Marty said, tapping the hood of my car, looking out over the snowy field hardened wherever grass met sidewalk, past that to Lake Monona frozen solid. He looked out quietly—we’d already shaken hands—and then he slowly peeled towards his front door. I wouldn’t see him again.