PERSPECTIVE

It's funny how you never end up where you thought you would, no matter which road you take. Way back there in high school, I thought things were pretty predictable, and that everything was much simpler than it turned out to be. I look back and think of all the roads not taken and wonder where and what I'd be if I had chosen a different fork. But I realize that in the end things are what they are. Maybe it's just as well that we don't know from the beginning how things will turn out. That makes sense to me now, and I'm sure it does to my friend, Carolyn, as well.

Carolyn and I had become good friends by the time I reached high school seniorhood. We had sort of grown up together, but I can't remember when we first met. It seems that I had known her forever. She had been on the fringes of my life at first, coming and going; close now, more distant at other times--present, but not an important part of my life. That came later, after I had spent years ignoring her while I hung out with her brother, Blaine, who was my best friend through those early adolescent years.

We weren't intentionally uncivil to Carolyn, Blaine and I, but boys and girls revolved around different suns at that age. Boys didn't have friends who were also girls. And, besides, Carolyn was the kid sister.

Although Blaine was a year older than I, we were almost inseparable during our school years, which means that I spent a lot of time at the Walker house. Carolyn's friends were girls then, and the things Blaine and I did held no interest for them. They were learning how to be girls in the games they played, and Blaine and I were busy learning to be boys.

The few times I did pay any attention to Carolyn was to aggravate her. That was Blaine's role as the older brother, and I sort of joined in as an unofficial member of the family. I'm convinced that boys are born with a gene, as yet undiscovered by medical science, which makes them pester girls until they reach the age of fifteen or sixteen. That's about the time all that other stuff kicks in, and the whole relationship changes.

Boys sort of sail through those early male-female acquaintances as if the things they say and do to girls will never come back to haunt them. Like the time Blaine and I walked into their living room and found Carolyn practicing her alt o clarinet. I took one look at that instrument and thought it was the strangest thing I had seen in all my life. She looked so serious trying to squeak out a tune that I couldn't help laughing.

"What's so funny, BB Brain?" she snarled.

"That thing. . .," I said, still snickering. "What is it? It looks like a pipe fitter's nightmare."

I don't know what I expected from her, but she appeared to have no sense of humor at all. She took the comment all wrong. There was something flashing in her eyes that should have warned me even before she came after me screaming like an incoming artillery round. "You want nightmares? I'll give you nightmares!"

She was mad enough to wrap her clarinet around my head. She might have done it, too, if she had been able to catch me. My lesson for the day: keep your comments to yourself around a serious musician, no matter what you think of the horn she plays.

That was the year that Carolyn joined Blaine and me in high school. It was an awkward time for me. I think it was for everybody, but maybe they were better at hiding it than I was. I went on for a while trying to ignore Carolyn, but I couldn't get away with it any more. All of a sudden one day, I noticed that she had developed a personality, and that we had a lot in common. And besides, overnight it seemed, she had become kind of cute. This I had never suspected during all those years of traditional boy-girl hostility. A whole new relationship began between us. Blaine even seemed to treat her differently. Maybe it had something to do with maturity, but from then on, Carolyn and I grew closer as friends.

After Blaine graduated from high school and joined the Air Force, Carolyn and I, left behind to finish our last years of high school, became best friends. We shared many of the same interests and enjoyed spending time together. On summer nights we sat on her family's front porch and talked until way too late to suit her parents.

We were full of dreams back then. It seemed to us that everything was possible, and that we had all the time in the world to do it. We talked often of going off to see the world, or being movie stars, of writing stories and singing songs. I might have been reluctant to admit it to the guys, but Carolyn and I even read poetry to each other.

On cool nights, or on summer evenings when the warm, honeysuckled breezes overcame us we would move inside and play Nat King Cole records for hours. Lost in mutual dreams of the limitless future, we said little as Mister Cole's mellow voice confirmed to us that all our dreams could come true. We were simply comfortable with each other in our innocence.

The time finally came, as it always must, to put some distance between dreaming and doing. I went off to college for a year. Carolyn stayed at home to finish her last year of high school. At the time I didn't think anything of it. I was sure she would follow her dreams sooner or later.

In the meantime I was learning that dreams can wait. College didn't do it for me. After a year I joined the Army, not to pursue a dream, but to fulfill a duty and to put on hold dreams that I now realize I was afraid of. I told Carolyn goodbye over the telephone. I could just see her shaking her head sadly as she wondered what had happened to the dreamer.

I didn't get home very often over then next several years, but I did meet my future wife and we were married a few months later. Building our new life together took us across the country and back, then back across the country again, this time to Arizona. I became a history professor, and my teaching assignments have taken me half way around the world.

It was fifteen years before I got back home for a visit. I found almost everything changed, not all for the better, but the good things seem to remain constant. I talked to Carolyn on the telephone. We spoke warmly, and a little sadly, about the old days. She said to me, "I was talking with one of my friends the other day. I told her that when I was a teenager my best friend was a boy, and how we used to be so close. Do you remember the things we did and how many dreams we had?"

"Yes, I remember," I said. "It seems so long ago."

"You remember all that?" she asked with some surprise. Maybe she hadn't expected that it would be so clear to me, too.

A trunk-full of memories swirled through my head in a split second. I could almost sense the anticipation I had felt all those years ago when the whole world lay before us. But it was tempered with the knowledge that I had left those dreams, or the way I had dreamed them, at least, back there on the Walker's doorstep.

I half expected her to say something about foolish youth and dreams giving way to reality. She surprised me. "Well," she said, "you've sure made a lot of your dreams come true."

"Me?" I couldn't hide my astonishment at her comment.

"Yes. You. You got away from here. You've traveled around the world. I'll bet you've seen all those places we used to talk about."

"Some of them," I said.

I had been to many of the places that to us had seemed as distant and mystical as Camelot or Oz; places whose names sounded like a wizard's incantation--Singapore, Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur, the Volga. But I had accepted everything in my life as a matter of course, never realizing just how special and miraculous it had all been in reality. Carolyn and I used to talk about putting Gaffney behind us as if all the wonder lay out there somewhere beyond the small, cotton-mill hometown that had been the limits of our world.

Well, she was right. I had gone to see the world. But it hadn't happened the way I had dreamed it. There had been no crusades, no dragons to slay, no great victories. What I saw as a very normal, day-to-day existence had led me through what, in fact, had been a pretty exciting and fulfilling life.

"I guess I have done a lot of things, but most of them weren't planned," I said. "Maybe that's the way life is, after all."

"You really believe that." She said it as a statement rather than a question.

"I guess so," I said. "Maybe if you wait long enough for something to happen, it will."

"I don't think so," she said. "I waited."