Someone once said that failure is easier to live with than regret, and it pierced my heart like an arrow.
Dreams are hard to catch, aren’t they?
Especially if you don’t have the courage to try.
“What are you reading?” Elizabeth asked.
“A journal.”
She squinted, disbelieving. “Since when do you keep a journal?”
“I don’t.” I held it up. “I kept this one in 1979. My mother gave it to me. She wanted me to write the great American novel.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald beat you to it,” Elizabeth said.
“Harper Lee fans might disagree,” I said. “As well as Hemingway fans.” I changed the subject, not wanting to dwell on my failure. “What are you doing, adding a second story?”
“Ha ha. The designer is coming over to discuss wall colors.”
“We have a designer?” I could see the price of the remodel increasing.
“It’s part of the contractor’s services,” she said. “But if you’re planning on quitting your day job to write novels, you might want to wait a year.”
Or thirty-six, I thought, but didn’t say. I considered my journal. “My mother gave this to me before my senior year in high school.”
“What made you even think of it?” Elizabeth asked. “Don’t tell me you were cleaning out the attic.”
“In this heat? It’s a hundred degrees plus up there. I’d die of heatstroke.” Like the guys William told me about who fried their brains in Vietnam’s heat and humidity. Another story I had not thought about in decades. “No, I got a package in the mail today from someone I knew a long time ago.”
“A girlfriend? Tell her you’re committed.”
“No kidding,” I said. “To this remodel. I might never get to retire.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. She ran her own real estate company and made a substantial salary.
“No, from a guy I worked with on a construction crew the summer I graduated high school. You remember Mike?”
“Your sister’s ex?”
“He got me the job.”
“So what was in the package?”
“This.” I held up William’s black book. “His journal from Vietnam.”
Elizabeth put down the highlighter she had been using to mark the plans. “Why did he send it to you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think he was ready to throw it out.”
“That’s random.”
I stepped to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat. “Not really. He and I used to talk after work. We’d sit in the garage of the house we were remodeling on Castillo Avenue in Burlingame, and he would tell me about Vietnam, what it was like, the impact it had on him.”
“I thought Vietnam vets never talked about Vietnam.”
“Most don’t.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Read it. I think. That’s what he asked, anyway, that I read it.”
“You sound hesitant.”
I nodded. “His stories were raw and honest,” I said. “He suffered from PTSD that summer, not that he or I knew it at the time, but he deteriorated pretty rapidly.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned him before?”
It was a good question, but I didn’t have a good answer for my wife. The summer I spent with William had been one of those transformative periods of my life—one I liked to both remember and forget. It was kind of like William’s journal. It was personal. It was between William and me, and I didn’t feel like it was my right to share his stories, what he had been through.
Or maybe I didn’t want to think of lost dreams.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Where is he now?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t put a return address on the envelope.”
“Seems odd.”
At first blush it probably did seem odd, but the lack of a return address was likely because William felt the same way about that summer as I did. It was something both to remember and to forget.
“You know that saying, the one I’ve told the kids about growing old being a privilege, not a right?”
“Yeah.”
“That came from William. He told me that after work one day.”
“I thought it was another line you plagiarized from a Seinfeld episode.”
I smiled, but Elizabeth knew me, and she knew William sending me his journal had been one of those unexpected moments that, while they didn’t exactly rock my boat, certainly made it list from side to side.