Word Count: 286
Eight people started the journey; only three of us made it to the end.
We were supposed to be doctors, lawyers, a couple accountants, a librarian and a pro football star. I was one of the lawyers. Jeffrey was the quarterback who made it to the big leagues and had several good seasons until he was found dead in a hotel room in Miami just before the big game.
Children make wishes. Adolescents have dreams. And college students make choices, take paths. There is that defining moment, after the campus has been selected, after the first year is sweated out and rolled into a ball and thrown in the back of the closet and a new outfit is worn.
I was planning on being a buyer at a high-end New York City department store. Lord and Taylor, or Bonwit Teller, or something internationally chic and expensive. The marketing courses turned me on. Questions tweaked me to the legalities. Law seemed so stable and pure at the time while merchandising began to seem sleazy.
Charmaine became a successful pediatrician and formed a marriage and a business partnership as well with Mark. Joe was an accountant who signed on with a corporation and eventually became CFO. Melanie was killed by a bus on the way to her job as assistant librarian out in Chicago’s East Side. Trudie was lost to her small hometown in Missouri and gave up her private accounting firm to produce numbers of kids. And Carl was disbarred for unethical practice in the handling of a career-making case for a large pharmaceutical company held responsible in the death of a child.
And me, I represented myself in Jeffrey’s murder trial and I lost.
