My inner 16-year-old is ecstatic. As is my outer 37-year-old. For the first time in my adult life, I owe no money. If the current job had done nothing else for me, this would have been plenty, although fortunately there are many other perks like cool people and interesting projects. So the lack of debt is freedom for my outer adult, long overdue and the result of a lot of hard work.

No debt means something else to the 16-year-old, though. Since that was the age (roughly) where I began to rack up debts of various kinds, first to my parents and then to over a dozen credit cards in the next 20 years, in some sense it's like picking up where I left off. A little cash in the pocket, a lot of dreams about what I could do with it. And one of the biggest dreams my teenage self had was this:

Not this one exactly—the teenage me dreamed of being like the small group of cool Mods at my high school, who mostly rode Vespas, at least in my memories. We already shared a lot of the same tastes in music (mostly ska & new wave), and if not for my innate and overwhelming shyness I might have discussed that with them & made some friends.

However, high school cliques and shy kids don't mix well, and so I found other less visible groups to be a part of until I could escape. The scooters stayed in my memory, though, filed away as a "maybe someday" for future reference. As I got closer to getting out of debt over the summer, fate in the form of several friends from work intervened and brought that memory back up to the surface. And so I decided that my scooter dreams were to be the fuel of my debt-free fire—I could buy the scooter once I was out of debt and able to afford it without having to use credit.

So now I find myself at 37, on the cusp of my 20-year high school reunion, the proud owner of a beautiful white steed—hereby christened "Rasagulla" for its Indian heritage, color, and sweetness. May it fuel as many memories in the coming 20 years as it has for the past 20.