Paths

Remember how much I dislike the Facebook (yes, the Facebook)?  Well, there was a flurry of conversation around photos in which I was tagged this week.  I sat and watched my inbox's message count rapidly climb from two, four, seven, to eleven, and then some.  The next morning, more.  I finally clicked to see what was stirring the lively thread.  What was my login again?  Right.

Little squares of little people faces looked out at me.  Yikes.  My first and second grade class pictures.  Who has time to scan and upload these things?!  Mothers of two young children, apparently.  As I took in the photos, names I didn't know I had tucked away suddenly resurfaced, all but two whose first initials were all I could manage.

I thought about what might happen at a potential reunion.  Many years ago, my sister bumped into a former classmate of hers.  George openly shared about what he had been up to.  His line of work was lucrative; all cash, little work, easy money, with a touch of risk.  "Good for him," I remember saying as she told me about her run-in.  "Not really," she had responded.  "He deals crack."  Oh.  We grew up in a working class neighborhood of West Philadelphia.  At school, the bathroom stall doors were missing.  Poor district > poor kids > poor career choices.  Heck, even wealthy district > wealthy kids > poor career choices.  It was more than plausible.

My science teacher opened homeroom one day with the announcement that our classmate Roxanne had perished in a fire the night before along with her five younger siblings whom she had been taking care of.  Her parents, who were not home at the time of the fire, survived.  She missed so much school already that none of us thought twice about her absence that morning.  Roxanne, the one who would never do her homework, the one who was always lost in class, the one who uh, was far more mature than us physically, yeah, that Roxanne.  It wasn't until this turn of events that I realized that this poor chum had been preoccupied running a household.  No time to do schoolwork or even go to school, only time to feed the babies.  We were eleven, twelve, maybe?  Gah.  I think about Roxanne every now and again.  It's hard not to.  What she'd be doing now, had a responsible adult been at home with them that night.

Years later, on my way to my parents' one day, I bumped into a close friend of Roxanne's.  A baby not yet old enough to hold its own head up laid in the stroller Shannon was pushing.  I was so happy to bump into this old school friend.  She was a kind soul.  As I heard myself ask whose baby she was watching, it clicked.  We were so young.  I was in college.  She blushed as she explained that she was looking at community college.

It's amazing how different our futures looked at that very moment.  Shannon may be leading a very fulfilling life right now, but there's a part of me that wonders how much easier it might have been to get there had she waited to have children until after school.  And George, how much more rewarding a career he'd have today had he pursued a different profession at so young an age, one that didn't harm his community or threaten his own safety.

It's hard not to wonder why my path wasn't theirs.  Or theirs mine.