Free Michelle Obama by David Colbert Page B

told Michelle to relax about the future and enjoy herself more. Although her example hadn't been enough to draw Michelle off the academic path, Michelle was tempted.
    Michelle was at Alele's bedside when her friend passed away. The experience caused Michelle to think about her friend's attitude toward life, and how it differed from her own. She asked herself, "If I died in four months, is this how I would have wanted to spend this time? I started thinking about the fact that I went to some of the best schools in the country and I have no idea what I want[ed] to do." She suddenly understood that her pursuit of excellence at Princeton and Harvard had narrowed her life, not widened it. She explained to reporter Richard Wolffe, "You can make money and have a nice degree. But what are you learning about giving back to the world, and finding your passion and letting that guide you, as opposed to the school you got into?"
    She was about to walk away from certain success. A senior lawyer at her law firm later said that if she had stayed with the firm "she would have been a superstar." But, Michelle recalled, "I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me," she later told the
New York Times.
"I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money."
    The problem was, money makes a difference when you owe a lot of it, and Michelle did. The student loans from Princeton and Harvard weighed heavily on her. But worrying too much about money also felt wrong to her. As she put it years later, she didn't want to roll up to the family reunion in a Mercedes-Benz.
    Barack's influence tipped the balance. He has never been as practical as Michelle, so it was easy for him to tell her to follow her heart. Money? He didn't notice it when he had it. His car at the time had a rust hole on the passenger side that was so big Michelle could see the street go by. Later, when he was a state senator, he would put government expenses on personal credit cards and forget to ask for repayment.
    Michelle's family, however, wasn't so casual. Her father was still alive at the time, and he asked, "Don't you want to pay your student loans?" Her college roommate Angela Acree could barely believe what Michelle was planning to do. "I'm sure at Sidley she made more money than her parents ever made," Acree recalled. "It just seemed incredible at the time that she'd leave."
    But along with pushing Michelle toward academic success, her parents had taught her to do what would make her happy. She was following that advice.
    She was also following the example of people who'd helped create opportunities for her, like the activists who had pushed Chicago in the 1960s from the era of "Willis Wagon" portable classrooms to high schools like Whitney M. Young. She told Mary Mitchell of the
Chicago Sun-Times,
"I did exactly what leaders in my community told me to do. They said do your best in school, work hard, study, get into the best schools you can get into and when you do that, baby, you bring that education back and you work in your communities."
    Michelle wrote to several charities and government agencies. One letter was passed along to Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff to Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley.
    The mayor was the son of the Richard J. Daley, who had run the city's Democratic political machine during Michelle's childhood. Michelle didn't have good memories of that. Her father's experiences as a precinct captain had made the whole family suspicious of politicians. The first Daley had fought to keep African Americans in small neighborhoods and poor schools.
    But Michelle went to an interview with Jarrett anyway. They liked each other instantly. Instead of lasting for a polite fifteen minutes, the interview went on for an hour and a half. They learned about each other. Jarrett's background and experience were fascinating. She was born in Iran, where her American father, a doctor,