The Boy I Might Have Been

Maybe it's because I was a rule-follower most of my life, especially my teens. Looking back and knowing now what I wish I had known then, I can't help but wish I had been someone else in high school. At least to know that I had I been inclined to do things differently, what kind of person would I be now?

And sometimes I wish I was 16 in this day and time with a whole lot of rebellion and black eye liner tossed in. I think I might have been the scary kid who sat in the back row of your algebra class. I would have been Hot Topic's target demographic, shopping there for everything with a healthy dose of The Cure, The White Stripes, Good Charlotte, and Led Zeppelin in my iPod. I might have submitted dark stuff about blood and steel for the literary magazine, and the only picture in my yearbook was my headshot. I wore black, and all the cheerleaders thought that I'd be the one that I was packing an assault rifle under my trenchcoat. Even though I was a kind and gentle soul who loved black-and-white photography and farmed butterflies in the darkness of my bedroom.

Well maybe that character was too harsh. But it's way too hard to imagine myself as the class president and football quarterback who got straight A's and got to wash the principal's car on the weekend. No matter which life I might have been, even I still can't envision myself as a Stepford fag, unless I had a clandestine affair with the football coach. That would change things considerably.

No, I'd be a hippie of the 21st century. I'd think "Napoleon Dynamite" was genius (and mind you, I've not seen this). I'd have shaggy hair and intellectual glasses and a scruffy beard. I'd write the movie reviews for the school newspapers, and I'd wear lots of plaid, khakis and Birkenstocks. I'd take art class and graphic arts, and I'd challenge my English teacher on the symbolism in Hamlet's soliloquy. I'd play guitar in the Quad or I'd listen to The Sundays or The Cranberries or REM or webcasts from the college radio station, while I journaled under a tall oak tree. And sketch pictures of the quarterback tossing the football in the cafeteria.

But I wasn't that person. And I think you reach a point in your life where you really can't go back. You'd be seen as immature, or the implications of changing aren't worth it. There's an income to consider, and family and friends. The movement isn't so much developing into something, as changing into something. And that's more of a deliberate movement.

It's amusing to ponder how that person in high school might have made me a different person today. Not that I'm particularly unhappy with who I am today. I know it's all part of a plan. But who doesn't wonder if things had been different?

I used to have a screensaver that scrolled the question, "Would the boy you were yesterday be proud of the man you are today?" If I think about it too much, a tear rolls down my cheek. It's a sobering thought when you think about how idealistic or imaginative we were before we got to the real world.

For the most part, the smart-ass kid I was -- the one who was president of the drama club, and wrote for both the literary magazine and the yearbook, the one who ironed his button-down shirts every night, the one who listened to Michael Bolton, Taylor Dayne and homemade mix tapes of the local radio station's Thursday night request hour, the one whose most rebellious act in high school was infiltrating the homecoming parade and breaking a bully's nose during his junior year, the one who fell asleep on the phone listening to his honey/hag sing her rendition of "Eternal Flame."

Is that smart-ass kid proud? Well, for the most part. Is this the life he thought he'd be living at 32? Not exactly. Hell, not at all. But that smart-ass kid. He was pretty naive. He had a lot to learn. So I think he learned to compensate.

This life ain't that bad. And chances are, when I'm 60, I'll be wondering if that 32-year-old man is proud of the 60-year-old he became.