Lookin' into their eyes, I see they're runnin' too

     Wow, it's actually been a week since I last wrote one of these. Look, it's just the second sentence and I know this is going to be a long one. It's been brewing in my mind for the last couple of days, and it's a mighty strong brew, so I'll try to put in a couple of stopping points for those without the time or the inclination to read extremely long posts.
     Friday night, I was out at a friend's house just to hang out. About a half hour after getting there, my dad calls and says that a guy was at their house asking for me. It turned out that is was Calvin, who was my best friend through junior high and high school. We were pretty inseparable, taking a lot of the same classes, hating the same teachers, and we were totally devoted to the Yearbook program. Sometime near the middle of our junior year, Calvin got a girlfriend, it became serious, and she ended up getting pregnant. Calvin tried to "do the right thing" by asking her to marry him, but her parents wouldn't let it happen. The kid was born the July between our junior and senior years. Calvin stuck with school pretty regularly until the spring of our senior year, and then he started missing school. A lot. When Spring Break rolled around, he dropped out, although the girl stuck with it until she graduated. Calvin took care of the kid, she went to school. I didn't talk to him much that summer, but the next summer, we got together and hung out for the day. He'd gotten married to the girl in a small courthouse ceremony the previous September, which I wasn't told about and was honestly a little hurt that he hadn't invited me or informed me in some manner (After all, my e-mail address hasn't changed in seven years, and he could obviously find where I lived today, so it seems he could at least drop me a line). For some reason, we went car shopping for him that day, and he bought new car (Calvin was really, really into cars in high school. When I say that, I mean that he had maybe five cars he was working on at one point in time. Some people collect stamps, Calvin collected crappy "classic" cars that really needed work). He bought that car three years ago. We hadn't talked since. He worked for Grandy's pretty steadily after the girl became pregnant and he was some kind of manager when I last saw him, so two years ago, I went to Grandy's to try and find him, but he had left by that point. I think I tried calling the phone number that he gave me, but I didn't get in touch with him. Even the e-mail address bounced back. He was essentially gone.
     So, three years after I last saw him, I get that call from my dad. As it turns out, I was home that weekend, so it was amazingly lucky that Calvin caught me when he did. We talked for a few minutes on the phone, during which time I gently probed for information. He and the wife had separated sometime last year after she'd had a second kid with him, she'd joined the National Guard and shipped off in January and came back in April, at which time she asked him for a divorce. So, the wife is now the ex-wife. He was now driving a truck for a junkyard, going on a big, circular path through several neighboring states five days a week. He was renting a house from an old English teacher of ours. There was this tone in his voice that made him sound hollow, that joy really didn't exist for him except where his kids were concerned. I told him where I was and told him to swing by, I was going to ditch my friends for the night to hang out with him. (Potty break if you need it)
     So, Calvin picked me up and we just went. Our hometown is now essentially a suburb of a big town across the river, so we naturally headed in that direction, since our town is dying a very slow death (the local theater went out of business, so now we have to travel about 30 miles to a theater in neighboring towns. It sucks). Anyway, so we talked about where I was, where old friends were, and he talked about regrets. He was so pissed at himself for not having stuck with high school and then gone to college. He was one of the smartest kids in the school. He scored a distinguished on his portfolio, and he was one of only 15 kids in my senior class to do that (unfortunately, they couldn't count his scores toward the final tally because he dropped out). Now, when he drives his truck, five times a week, he passes the university where he had planned to go. We ended up going to a pizza place/bar and then back to his place to continue to catch up. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to catch up on. It ended up being a lot like Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days," where people who knew each other in high school end up talking about high school. Calvin and I weren't really trying to get back to our "glory days," we just really didn't have anything else to talk about. That was kind of fun, but it was also sad. At the end of the night, I gave him my e-mail address and phone number, and told him that if he ever gets a chance to visit, I've got a couch with his name on it. I really want to build a friendship with him again, but I'm wondering how to.
     The thing that makes me sad the most is that despite how close we were, there's not the much there now. I told him things about my life that very few people know, but it has no real impact on him like it does on my current circle of friends. Where I currently am, I have friends who are like siblings to me, that I share just about everything with and enjoy hanging out with for hours on end. Yet, in a few years, when we move away for jobs or just to wander the Earth, when I get together with them, will we have anything in common, or will we just talk about our "glory days?" I seriously don't want that to happen. I'm sad to find out it happened to Calvin and me, but it scares me that it might happen to me and some of my current friends. I hope it doesn't happen, I really do. I have a hard time imagining what my life would be like without talking to these people once a week; I can't fathom not doing so for months or years at a time.
     Catching up with Calvin also taught me a lesson about, well, me. The past few years, I've felt like I've done nothing with my life. Yeah, I've got a degree, but I really didn't do anything to get it. I took classes that seemed like they'd be fun, some of which were. I took classes that were "required" and did the least amount of work possible, passing them all with relative ease. I've paid a lot of money to get a degree that was really just a way to get into a grad program, which I'm actually learning from and doing stuff in. Except for social growth, I feel like I've lost four years. I'm unmotivated. I'm tired of the bureaucratic bullshit that I've been going through. I've questioned how the hell I got to where I am, and tried to find exactly what figurative roads brought me here. I think I have friends here who are the same way, but I've been with most of them for the past four years, so we ended up questioning it all together. Calvin taught me that he's done the same thing. He was on a very different path, yet we're all starting to feel the same way. There's a line from Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty" which I took a chunk of as the title of this post:

"Lookin' out at the road rushin' under my wheels,
I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels.
I look around at the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through.
Lookin' into their eyes, I see they're runnin' too."

From what Calvin told me about where several people from high school currently are, we're all runnin' on empty. That's sad, but comforting, too.
     He also brings another Jackson Browne lyric to mind which would make an awesome SotP, but this seems more appropriate. Calvin's graduated with his GED last year (valedictorian, actually, scoring extremely high without having studied any of it since high school), doesn't have the financial structure to go to school, has two kids that are weighing heavily on him since their mother really doesn't want them because they interrupt her new partying lifestyle, a job he doesn't like and with no real chances to move up the ladder, a friend's wife who is falling in love with him and he feels wrong about it, and no real friends around, only asshole cousins who grab his ex-wife's ass in front of him to tick him off and who take and deal drugs but say that "it's okay, we're working undercover for the cops." Essentially, Calvin is surrounded by shit, and he knows that he's to blame for a good chunk of it. That's why "These Days" comes to mind, and the lines

"These days I sit on cornerstones,
And pass the time in quarter-tones to ten, my friend.
Don't confront me with my failures;
I have not forgotten them."

It was oddly prophetic that I put that on a CD to drive home to Thursday morning. It saddens me to know that Calvin is in that situation, and it saddens me even more that I can't really do anything about it other than drop him a line every now and then so he has someone to talk to it about.
     Well, that's about it. It was a long, sweeping narrative epic that I'm sure had you enthralled. Hope you took advantage of the pee break and, if you didn't, I hope your bladder didn't explode. However, if that was the case, your dedication is appreciated.