Last time I told you about my new ambition, to become a grocery store cashier. Maybe you want something like that, too, for the health insurance that goes with the position, as well as the wee stipend for stuff like rent, pet food, and gas for the car.

I was surprised to find no line of hopefuls wrapped around the store when I arrived shortly after sunrise, but a steady stream presented itself: men as well as women, some my age, some young enough to be my children.

I found myself hoping that the polite young man who got there just as I did would get the job, or that it might go to the young woman with the beautiful smile who held the heavy door back for us to enter as she exited. These kids need a good job with benefits, I thought. It could be a great start for them.

Maybe that's why I, uh, forgot to mention my previous cashiering experience on the application. Or maybe it was because I really just don't want to be a cashier again.

Imagine.

Never expected to be doing that now, as a 48-year-old divorcée. Never expected to be a 48-year-old divorcée.

Silly me.

The representative said I'd hear from the company in a week if they had a place for me. So if my phone's going to ring, that should happen any time now.

I'd prefer to be waiting for word of my ascension to a full professorship, or that the syndication deal I'd been working on has come through.

Those calls may come, someday. For now, though, I'd relish the safety provided by a little job at the grocery store.

And if I don't get it, I'd be really happy to see the face of that young man, or that young woman, when next I approach the register with my bananas and sparkling juice in hand. 

I have to admit, you have been a hard year to live through. I have felt more pain in your 365 days than I have in all other years combined! (Except, perhaps, for 1990… my freshman year in High school.) Although I grew a lot over the past 12 months and have many things to thank you for, I am quite happy to say goodbye to you. In these final days, I hope you don’t mind if I say goodbye to all the things I hope to leave behind as you draw to a close and a young and hopeful 2009 takes your place.

Goodbye profound sadness! I have felt you seeping away little by little as visions of the future start to overlay snapshots of my final days with Ahmed. You have been a noble yet predatory emotion. You pounced on me in the strangest places: in movie theatres and subway cars, in the shower, in the mirror, and in the bed right before I fell asleep. You always seemed to catch me off guard, but I don’t resent you. You are a measure of how much I have loved and how much I will miss certain aspects of my marriage. Your painful grip on my heart has reminded me that I am alive. Still, I am not sorry to see you go… you are meant to be vivid and brief. I hope we will not meet again for a good long time…

Goodbye uncertainty! I have chosen my path now! There is no need to linger any longer. You have been dismissed. I won’t miss you and, although I am sure you will continue to pop up intermittently in the coming years, I doubt you will have such an impact on my other endeavors. You may take your two-headed loud-mouthed cacophony elsewhere. I can’t hear you now.

I don't drink. It took a long time and some hard knocks to teach me that I just ought not consume alcohol, because my life is better when I don't.

But New Year's Eve is a good time for me to remember that.

It's pretty simple. I know there is nothing I can't make worse by adding alcohol to it. But the idea that one doesn't drink, ever, can be really difficult for people to grasp because drinking is such a huge part of life in these United States.

Big events are easy. I secure a glass of ginger ale or cola as soon as I arrive. When I have something in my hand, there's no reason for anybody to try to put a drink there, and I've never had anybody make a big deal of the fact that I'm abstaining from alcohol.

When I attend a more intimate affair, I bring sparkling cider or juice so I‘m sure there's something I‘ll enjoy.

But at either type of gathering, if the nonalcoholic drinks run out, if the shenanigans of the drinkers get to be a bit much, or if I find myself wanting a drink, I thank my hostess and leave.

Those who drink alcohol can be curious or unsettled in the presence of those who don't. Often people who have a problem with the idea that someone doesn't drink have an alcohol problem of their own. Others may simply be unused to the concept, just as it can take a while for some people to understand that "vegetarian" means not eating flesh at all, not even turkey or fish.

I've tried to assure the people I care about that they needn't worry about drinking in my presence. My alcohol issues are mine, and I don't want anybody else to get caught up in them.

The best way I've found to do that is not to take a drink. And so I will not be having a drink on New Year's Eve. Or, I hope, any other time.

Here's what's funny. I don't remember what my husband and I did on New Year's Eve. I suppose we were at the ski house one year, or went to some party, maybe just stayed home. The point is: It doesn't matter what you do when you're married. Because you're married.

I do remember my husband's friend telling me her parents always played tennis on New Year's Eve. They reserved an indoor tennis court, played doubles with their best friends, then broke out chilled champagne and went home.

I was impressed. It sounded so civilized.

I don't remember what I did the first year after I was divorced. What I do remember of my dating years on New Year's Eve was anything but fun. I remember standing freezing in a slinky dress and high-heeled shoes, in slush in a New York street with my boyfriend, trying to catch a cab.

I remember another boyfriend, another time, getting caught between parties at midnight, trying to catch a cab.

Then there were the years I didn't have a boyfriend, plenty of them. Some years I gave a party, alone, and tried to get my guests to skip the kissing-at-midnight part. One year I stayed home alone, and got a surprise midnight phone call from a drunk-dialing ex-boyfriend.

I eventually learned that the worst part of New Year's Eve in New York City is transportation, so that eliminated going to the West Village or Soho, and forget about Brooklyn or the Bronx.

So I went (alone) to parties on the Upper West Side, walking distance, and tried to leave before the midnight kissing part.

My favorite neighborhood party was at a Victorian house near Central Park. The host was a college professor, the wife a painter. The guests were smart, funny, older, knew how to drink without getting drunk. Many of them abstained until midnight, at which point they stripped down to running clothes and hit Central Park for the four-mile road race.

I think I want to become a cashier. In yesterday's classifieds I found an ad seeking Cashiers — yes, with a capital C. One of the grocery stores I frequent is looking for cashiers (who also will get to stock shelves and clean floors) to start at $10.80 per hour.

That's a lot more than I made last time I was a cashier.

This company appears to treat its workers better than everybody I cashiered for in my misspent youth, too. The people at the registers sit in chairs and customers bag their own purchases.

But, and this is what really got my attention, employees are eligible for insurance covering medical, dental, and vision after 90 days.

Wow. That would've been enough to get me excited, but wait, there's more: The company also offers a retirement income plan and 401(k), paid vacation after six months — and an extra dollar an hour for working on Sundays, when they don't open until noon.

I remember real jobs, the kind that offered such marvelous benefits. And the benefits are what I really need, thank you very much; if I could get an employer to give me decent health insurance, I might be willing to forgo a salary.

Heaven knows I've made do without one for years.

I have a graduate degree and lots of experience in areas other than retail. Before I moved, the Good Doctor instructed me not to sell myself short in my quest for work. She might not exactly approve of my aspiration to ring up roasts, instant coffee, and bags of apples.

On the other hand, I think she'd probably appreciate my desire to keep feeding and housing myself and the animals and to have the medical coverage I so feared losing when I got divorced.

When she got divorced, she was a waitress.

The ad says a representative will be available to meet Cashier hopefuls tomorrow beginning at 7 am. It'll be pretty cold then.

I hope the line won't be too long.

"Who is he?" the Good Doctor asked me about Jack, my new man. I looked at her quizzically. "Where have you seen this person before?" she said. "He must remind you of someone in your past for you to be so comfortable with him so quickly."

Oh. We'd agreed that my ex, Edgar, was my father. (Yikes!)

I thought for a moment (one of the very expensive moments that come in a 50-minute hour) and drew a blank.

"Nobody," I said. "He doesn't remind me of anybody else."

He was far more honest and open than the other men this sick puppy had been involved with. And he was eager to help me with pretty much anything — something else I'd never seen a lot.

I concluded that he was different from all who had come before, which made him ideal.

There are none so blind as those who will not see... 

Jack and I have been together for months now, and I think I've figured out who he is: both of my controlling parents.

Oh, dear.

This didn't occur to me until I read Elaina's post from Friday. "We seek," she wrote, "not only what we know, but what we know will force us to grow."

Great. As if living once again in the same town as my parents wouldn't be enough to stretch me.

I have no idea yet what I'll do with this insight. I have decided that running down the road screaming isn't an option.

For now.

I know that when I'm not mad at Jack, he's fabulous. When I am mad at him, I'll try to recall that my history may have something to do with it.

Either way, he's a blessing. And way cuter than many of the other hard lessons I've chosen for myself.    

My in-laws come for Christmas next week. It's not my holiday, Christmas, and I despise the excess of it, but I'm a sucker for tradition. Also, the tree smells nice.

It matters to me that my girls keep the customs of their grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers before. That they remain linked, and that they understand all the cultures that made them.

I can share only half, the Jewish rituals passed down through my people. So, I'll make potato latkes and spin the dreidel with them, light the menorah each night and teach them the blessings.

But I'm grateful Sam's parents can visit with their red velvet cake and, hopefully, stories waking up Christmas morning when they were kids. Pass down what I can't.

I bitch about Sam's parents, resent the "stuff" passed on to him and so to me, because it happens this way: what you do not deal with, the problems you don't stand down, they don't disappear, they are passed to the next generation.

Merry Christmas.

There's a present for you. No, for real.

I'm looking at it as a gift this year, an opportunity to better understand why Sam is who he is. To understand why I chose him as my partner, and after leaving him, why I made the same choice again.

Some people say we marry our parents; another perspective is we partner with people who present a chance to work where we need it most. We seek, not only what we know, but what we know will force us to grow.

And we go back until the lesson is learned.

What I've learned: I'm not going to change Sam's family. No matter what I do, no matter what truth I try to shock them with, they will never get real. They will always avoid the uncomfortable and when the small talk plays out, 99 times out of 100 they'll choose silence over depth.

I started dating before my divorce was final. Maybe you did too, so maybe you don't think I'm going to hell.

I don't know if my father thinks that's what will happen, but he certainly wasn't happy about my behavior. Initially, I understood his concern: my new relationship might cause problems as I ended the old one.

But it turns out that Florida, despite its backwardness in many other areas, is remarkably enlightened about divorce. Under Florida law, there are only two reasons to end a marriage: the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, or the mental incapacity of one of the spouses. Under Florida law, I learned that, as a rule, adultery doesn't enter into the equation.

If, say, I had exhausted the marital assets on trips to Fiji for the boyfriend and me, the court probably would have frowned on that. But since the two alcoholics in my marriage had already exhausted most of their assets, I saw no risk.

I explained this to my father more than once. But now that he's old, his mind isn't so flexible anymore, and he could not, would not, wrap it around the idea that it was okay for my life to go on while I divorced. He glowered a lot and made menacing pronouncements about the earful he would have for me when the time was right (which, thankfully, it never was).

To this day he hasn't met the new man in my life.

One morning at breakfast, shortly after my divorce was final, he asked a simple question. "Sondra, how old are you?"

I looked at him, figuring this was the beginning of the tirade he'd been holding for months. "Forty-eight," I replied.

"Oh," he said. I think he had forgotten.

And then he added, "You'd better be glad you're grown and nobody can tell you what to do any more."

Really? Nobody can? Not even you, Pop?

Wow. I guess Daddy's Little Girl is an adult at last, and all I had to do was get divorced.