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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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July 19, 2001

One Right Turn

Prior to moving to Roanoke at age 9, we lived in Greensboro N.C. Greensboro is pretty much a city like any other, but I have often wondered what my life would have been like if we had remained there. I know what my brother Jim's life would have been like - he wouldn't have one. He'd be in jail.

Jim you see, was close friends with one "Murdock McDaniel". Murdock was every young mother's nightmare. The friend of your sons who you just know is going to be trouble with a capital "T". Even as 12 year olds, Jim and Murdock found their share. As a younger brother I was spared the worst of the details, but I seemed to remember something about accidently rolling a neighbor's car down a driveway as being one of their greater infractions.

I can still remember the stories in the neighborhood about guys like Murdock. Such rumors became the seeds of tall tales that found fertile ground in our young imaginations, "That McDaniel is one bad hombre... I hear he has a switchblade, and he used it once on a guy that talked bad about his sister... cut his ear off and fed it to his dog... don't mess with Murdock..."

And certainly not his sister.

I don't imagine she was asked out on a great many dates during her teens, at least until Murdock wound up where so many of his young friends mothers figured he would ; an old friend from Greensboro told me that by the time Murdoch was 21 he'd found permanent lodging at the North Carolina State Penitentiary.

Brother Jim is made up of some pretty good stuff, however, and I'd like to think that he would have eventually parted ways with his partner in mischief when the felonies started, but as they say, (whoever "they" are), "you just never know".

After years of less than perfect ones, sometimes all it takes is just one wrong turn.

A friend at a party the other night recounted her best friend while growing up - the two were inseparable she said. They seemed to have everything in common. All the way through High School they shared the joys and sorrows of life together. But when the college years arrived they went their separate ways - my friend to Sweetbrier College outside of Lynchburg, and her best friend to another local college that shall go unnamed lest any unfair assumptions be made.

"Lisa" arrived back in Roanoke on Christmas break after her first semester, woefully preppie by her own estimations, but not so much so that she didn't remember her roots. She had a couple of extra days so she arranged a visit to her friends campus before they too were out on break. She hadn't been there five minutes when she reached for a text book on the table.

"Whoa ! Don't touch that one!", her friend yelled, "That's where I keep my paper..."

"Your paper?" Lisa questioned.

"Yeah, you know man - my paper... my blotter...",

Lisa looked at her funny. She hadn't heard the lingo.

"My acid paper", her friend finally said exasperated. "That's where I keep my drugs, dummy."

"Uh,..Uh,.... Oh...", said Lisa, "Sure."

But she wasn't so sure. An hour later she was already on her way home. She wasn't following her friend around that wrong turn. I asked her how her old friend was doing these days. It only got worse. You don't want to read it here, I can assure you.

"Its all so strange" Lisa told me, "we were so much alike in so many ways... and then bam, we're a million miles apart... things can change so quick."

They sure can. But usually such changes are slowly forming over the course of several years and even a lifetime. The decisions we make in life, even the "little ones" build upon each other, ultimately making us who we are.

The first sentence of Anne Tyler's new novel, "Back When We Were Grownups" reminded me of Lisa's friend: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person..." Like so many of us in our worst moments, the main character in Tyler's novel finds herself asking the question, "How on earth did I get like this?"

I think C.S. Lewis provides a pretty good answer.

"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before... with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature - either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself, or into one that is not. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other."

A thought that should give us all pause to ask, "Where have my "turns" been taking me?

If you're not so sure, be thankful that it's never too late... even after years of less than perfect ones - sometimes all it takes is just one right turn.