Periodically Saucytart enjoys Googling herself and others of her acquaintance. It fulfills a secret agent need to lurk in the bushes to find out what people from her ill=conceived past (and present) might be up to.
Call it a weakness. Call it what you will, it gives her a secret thrill to see her own name pop up first on a the search and others, well, not at all or only after deep, deep digging.
Most recently the old gal was wondering about a mad crush she had on a boy in grad school. He was British, a red-haired poet, super smart and one imagined as one does in grad school on the fast track to becoming the next Allen Ginsburg -- or something like that. Incidentally, he was quite roguishly attractive in that sexy-ugly way some men have (including the irresistable pull of the self-loathing artist).
So imagine ST's surprise when she Googled the old boy (because that's what he is now) and found nary a poem or publication to his credit, although she did run across some scholarly work. And then the biggest shock of all -- how ordinary he'd become. The boy-man who inflicted such passions in her unschooled heart is now a high school teacher at a fancy-pants prep school charging tuition of $29,000 a year! He coaches soccer and teaches Brit-Lit.
ST won't post his pic. That would be too unkind, but suffice to say, he is changed.
Mind you, Saucytart is not gloating. She is merely making an observation about the way dreams are deferred. She wonders when his dream became about making ends meet rather than making art. She suspects it occurred rather early on, even before he left Brooklyn to earn a Ph.D. on the West Coast.
She remembers a comment he once made regarding his thesis, a chapbook of poetry, that no one would ever read it. Perhaps he was right, having set his intention to that goal.
Saucytart wishes him well and hopes he's happy. His school photo shows him smiling quite broadly, something rarely seen in his BK days when he seemed to milk the morose poet act for all it was worth.
He was a very talented poet if not a particularly kind person.
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