random

David was a smart aleck of the worst kind. I met him in 5th grade, the year I transferred from Lutheran school to public. After Lutheran started taking the town riff-raff, kids expelled from schools for misbehavior, my parents figured they may as well save the money, so surrendered their little girls to public education.

It was daunting for a small school girl to move into that tough kid world, though in retrospect, the toughness of the public schools in that Oklahoma town of 25 thousand is debatable. It seemed tough. It seemed scary. I stayed quiet and devoted myself to my work.

There were a few of us who aced all the tests, who competed hard for top marks in all the major subjects. David and I ran neck and neck through fifth grade. Though there were other kids nipping at our heels, we swapped top spots all year long.

The pinnacle of my public school academic career was achieved at the end of 5th grade, when the top scores on the standardized tests were announced. Nearly all of my classmates turned in anticipation to watch David, sitting in nonchalance, a smug look on his face. Oh, it was so divine when the teacher announced my name. Thirty heads swiveled in unison, eyebrows raised, mouths shaping little round Os. "Lynette!" Yes.

It was down hill from there. I found drugs and the bad kids who came with them. I lost track of David, though I'd see him occasionally at school or we'd pass in the hallways. We shared a math class in junior high, a class I skipped most days so I could read at the library.

I did fall in with Monty, though, David's older brother. Monty ran with my doper crowd while David remained a geeky science freak who never entered my orbit of artists, hippies, drug addicts and thieves.

When I was 16, Monty hanged himself in jail. He had just turned 19, got arrested for possession. Word went around that he was a narc and the story was told that David went to visit him at the jail, told him there were people looking to kill him. Monty was dead the next morning.

I don't know if it was the loss of his brother or a sense that he played a part in Monty's death, but David fell off the planet. He quit school, vanished from that little town. I moved away and forgot about him, forgot about all of the people I'd gone to school with, got in trouble with.

Fifteen years ago, in an AA meeting downtown, there was a guy who kept staring at me over his book. After the meeting, he approached and asked my name. It was David, my arch enemy from grade school, the brother of my dead doper compadre.

David was a drunk like me, and worse. He was living on the street, smoking crack. He rambled and made little sense. I thought he might be mentally ill as well. We said our hellos, isn't it amazing, what have you been doing, all of the superficial pleasantries that pass between strangers of long acquaintance.

A few weeks later, Mike returned from a meeting, said he'd picked up a new sponsee. "Name's David. Lives in an abandoned house down at Haskell and Main. Doesn't have a phone and there's no electric, but he said he's got some gas lamps and we can do the work."

The Work, the 12 steps, the process of recovery. David, 5th grade arch enemy, and my husband, the man who never says no, set to work on the steps. Mike tried. He never quit on anyone. It was David who finally broke it off after almost two years, severed the relationship in a fit of paranoid rage and unfounded accusations.

Isn't life strange? It's been thirteen years now since we've seen David and tonight, just now, Mike came home from a meeting, said "guess who I saw?"

He's got a place to stay, still crazy as all get out. On some kind of medication to control his urge to drink. He's got $40,000 left from his trust fund and he's obsessing about what to do when it runs out, just as he did 13 years ago when he had ten times that much.

David's life trajectory turned and never recovered after a conversation, after one single event. Granted, it was a big event. Suicide is a wretched thing and the loss of a sibling an unimaginable misery. I don't know why some people seem to survive the awful things, to ultimately come through the hard times of life, while others are sucked deep into the vortex of self destruction, never to surface again.

What do you think it is, this resilience of spirit? of mind? I haven't any idea, it seems so random that it frightens me, as if any one of us could wake up one morning, experience a tragedy, and be lost ever after.