Class of Someday, maybe never

Push-pull. Approach-avoidance. To want something but not want to do what's required to get it. Or maybe not be able. Tough choices, decisions. All that wrapped up in an unlikely obsession with a catalog full of class rings. Quite the symbol, they are, but of what I'm not certain.

"Perhaps, George, the first thing you need to determine is what year you'd have engraved on the thing," I say, gently teasing. Dead serious.

"I know it," he smiles. Sheepish. The brochure slides out of his grasp but not out of his gaze. He picks it back up, looks hard at the $400 token of. . .something. Not a promise to himself, though I wish it were. A substitute, perhaps. If diplomas could be purchased he's be first in line, I'm afraid, I believe. Perhaps that's not quite fair.

He has taken a third shift job, is the thing. Full-time. He doesn't want it, except that he does. Getting off work at 7 a.m. doesn't bode well for making an 8:15 class, and yet first thing Monday morning, there he was. "I didn't expect to see you," I told him, "I heard you were working." And after he said that he might quit, or might come if he got off early (not today, he didn't), our conversation wandered all over the top of that catalog, from the futility of just putting the time in, to the pain of the third shift--I had my own short been there, done that story--to the importance of him committing to something, to his dreams of a house and maybe a business in Veracruz, to our shared ignorance of why anyone would put a NASCAR driver on the side of a class ring.

On the page of symbols-available-for-purchase that he showed me, George preferred the eagle or the scales of Libra. Typical that he hadn't read the fine print well enough to realize that neither were available on the ring he had chosen--only the year. How impossibly appropriate. If the design of this imaginary ring were in my hands, I'd outline a student with his hands politely folded. Still except for the thoughts running through his restless mind.

When I talk to him about school, I talk about improving his reading and writing because that would surely help him. He doesn't really want to hear it, because he's afraid it might be impossible, and thus better not to try. When I talk about graduating, I only say that I know that he wants it, that it's a matter of doing the work. I tell him things that he knows. I don't say things I don't believe--I'm afraid he might be out of time. And, really, we both know what he'll do. Perhaps that's not quite fair.

But I have no magic words, or don't recognize them if I do. If that's what he wants from me, I suppose that I have failed him. He's already eighteen, a freshman on credits, and a wish and a prayer do not make one a sophomore. I can outline his choices, encourage every good thought, but that's not what he wants. What he wants is that ring. Whatever it stands for, whatever it means.