Looking Back

By Mac Wheeler

Turning forty it became less “in order to” and more “if only.” My guess is that’s fairly normal, though I’ve never asked any of my friends if they experienced the same transition. When I turned fifty, I know I began to appreciate more what I had. With that, came the recognition that I could have had much more, if I had given more. I’m not referring to physical things. Things are just that, items to be discarded.

What I’ve learned, too late, is the value of friends, even acquaintances—and family. I find it easier to find excuses than to accept blame for forgetting people like I have, in order to move on—excuses like, I changed jobs, or moved, or had a family to raise.

One of the earliest examples with moving on that comes to mind too frequently was Ronnie. I’ve long forgotten his last name. He was a good kid. He was one of the first boys I met when I started fresh at my new school in the lower valley—Marian Manor—sixth grade.

I think sixth grade is when a lot of us change—and I’m not talking about puberty. A lot happens that year. I think the people we’re around that pivotal period makes more impression upon the kind of human we’re to become, than any subsequent year we live through.

If we’re around caring, thoughtful people, it sticks in your consciousness more than it does later. I know caring didn’t sink into my brain. So I live the drudgery of thinking about Ronnie from time to time—a friend I could have had for life.

That is probably overly dramatic. There were plenty of things to keep Ronnie and me from being fast friends. He was bright and had a future, for one thing. I was a troglodyte. He lived in a rambling ranch-style home up the highway, with a hundred acres of prime land around it. His family raised dozens of Quarter Horses, Arabians and Appaloosa.

This is to say his family had money. I was from the neighborhood near the tracks, with three-bedroom-one-bath homes fitting in fourteen-hundred square feet—about the space of Ronnie’s four-car garage.

I was invited to his Halloween party that year. I was amazed at his world. He had his own private room—about the size of our house—just to play in. It had a huge color TV and a pool table—a shower for goodness sakes, so you didn’t have to go into the main house after taking a dip in the pool—a pool—something only the truly rich had. I was the kid who cut cardboard and slid it into the front of my shoes so my toes didn’t get bloody when I played basketball on the asphalt courts at school.

Back to the party. We had a treasure hunt. I had never heard of such a game. This was so high-class to me. Instead of trick-or-treating for candy, we had to get certain items from the homes we visited. That was a little tough, because Ronnie didn’t live in the middle of a neighborhood. But we went hiking down the gravel road anyway, ringing the doorbells of houses a quarter mile away.

The thing that sticks in my mind about the hunt is that some older kids offered us cigarettes since they didn’t have any of the items on our list of things we had to collect—a consolation prize I guess you can call it. It was so cool to me that Ronnie wasn’t enticed. He just spoke up for his team that we weren’t into that. Most of the kids I ran with would have asked for a pack of matches to go with ’em.

Ronnie was a little guy, skinny as a stick. He couldn’t compete when we played smear the queer, or team keep away. He didn’t like football or my favorite, basketball. He played the trombone in the orchestra, and left school at the bell to work with his horses. He wasn’t all that popular. In the categories developed a few decades later, he would have been considered a dweeb maybe, at least a geek—that was before being a geek was in. I thought I was on my way to becoming cool, one of the athletes everyone looked up to—emulated as the school elite.

So we didn’t see each other much. He was in the classes where the kids actually did homework, and were expected to learn. By the eighth grade the councilors had me lumped in with the losers they figured would never accomplish anything—probably not finish the second year of high school. I never intentionally avoided Ronnie. I always liked him. We just had zilch in common.

But he had the character I wish I was surrounded by then, as well as today.

I thought I had personality back in those days. Sadly, I realize it was just disruptive behavior, a need to have everyone looking at me, listening to me—center of attention. I spoke too loudly, and allowed my hormones to make a cad out of me.

Ronnie was quiet, considerate. He dressed well. But he had a quick smile. He always won first place in the science fair.

If he survived his ordeal, he no doubt runs a big company, and drives one of those big flashy Mercedes. I take that back—he probably stuck to his roots and drives a well-kept F250. I picture him married to a petite woman of character, one who wasn’t hung up on machismo. They would have had two-point-three children who all went to Cal Tech, or maybe some Ivy League school.

We moved to high school—Ysleta, a school with an attitude. Far enough in what routinely got called the suburbs a decade or so later—with more cotton fields than neighborhoods around it. I moved away from sports, and participated in JROTC—I was thinking the army might be the only place I could make it after school, ’cause I wasn’t doing so hot at anything else—nothing was clicking for me. I didn’t see any other options. For a time I ran with the cowboys. I raised and slaughtered calves for Ag class, went on the FFA hay rides, and played spin the bottle.

Ronnie was in the honor society and student council. My peers called his kind fags. That disgusts me today. I wish it did then. I just smiled and tried to forget that Ronnie was one of my favorite people years past, someone I looked up to. He didn’t have to curse to express himself. He didn’t have to run anyone down to feel like somebody.

He was still skinny as a stick. He had a funny walk—swaggered side-to-side a little like he didn’t have the muscle to propel his cowboy boots.

The accident was in the newspaper. The Assistant Principal spoke of it during the morning announcements. Ronnie’s horse had slipped after rearing, and fell back on top of him. He was in bad shape, and it wasn’t clear if he would survive. I remember feeling badly, and wished I could reach out to him. But I didn’t. I let another opportunity pass by.

Ronnie did come back to school later that year. He looked terrible. Take a skinny kid about five-foot-four and reduce his weight forty pounds and you get an idea what he looked like. His skin was gray. He no longer smiled. Even his hair had a sickly look to it. He didn’t look around—like the halls weren’t what he remembered—like he was someplace new. He was a different person. The kids avoided him, even his dweeb friends, I think. He was an outcast when he needed friends more than any other time in his life.

God! Kids can be cruel.

Shortly after he came back to school, I was walking in a packed hallway at the end of the day and Ronnie was just ahead of me. I was thinking I should push through the throng and catch up with him and say something—a welcome back, at least. About that time I saw him reach up and cover his mouth with his hand as he spewed.

He caught most of the vomit, but some of it squirted into the hair of one of the popular senior girls that happened to be walking in front of him. She and her friends stopped and made this big deal about the creep who threw up on her.

I did nothing. Ronnie rushed to the side and I walked on like I didn’t see him—like I didn’t see what had happened. I didn’t try to help him. He was obviously sick. I know he must have been humiliated for throwing up on someone. I just walked past.

I hope that isn’t the character I eventually grew into. I’d like to think I grew into a caring, compassionate man. I know that if I had kept Ronnie as one of my friends, I would have been more likely to be that kind of person.

My junior year, I moved to a new school in the city. In the past I could breeze by just attending my remedial classes—doing nothing. The new school wasn’t on to me yet though, and the councilors put me into classes that challenged me. I found myself sitting next to kids again who had the character I remember in Ronnie.

Thank God it wore off on me a little bit more the second time ‘round—not as much as I wish it had. But I didn’t end up digging ditches for a living, or shoveling horse manure at the stables like I did during summer breaks in high school.

By accident I went on to college, following these new friends. But I still didn’t learn that it’s all about the people you surround yourself with, and keep close.

No one ever told me.

Go figure that’s a lesson you have to learn on your own. I wish I kept in contact with them.

There are hundreds of faces in my memories, but I don’t have names for most of them anymore. That is a private crime, a personal sin of the spirit. I’ve learned very late in life that it’s more about the people who attend your funeral, those lives you touch, than the cars parked in your driveway, and the things that line your living room wall.

It troubles me I don’t know if Ronnie made it. I hope he did. He was a good boy, and I know he would have grown into a good man, the kind of man I’d like to call friend.

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Mac recently completed his twelfth manuscript, a fantasy novel based on two anthologies of the same setting and characters. His other works include two mainstream fiction, a science fiction trilogy, two urban fantasy and two other-word fantasy novels. Mac has been writing nearly two decades, is active in Tampa Writers Alliance, Florida Writers Association, multiple novel pods, and coordinates a TWA critique group. In his first submission to a writing contest last year he won first place for a science fiction short story. This spring he won third place for one of his fantasy novels. Read about his novels, or read one of Mac’s short stories at: http://home.roadrunner.com/~macwheeler/