In driver's ed, as you take more and more exams, watch more and more movies and sit closer together with people you are tired of, eventually everyone becomes crankier and crankier. Toward the end of the thirty hours emotions, especially among the boys, are flying high. Girls tend to do a thing because it needs to be done, and their lives are hard enough as it is. Each boy is in driver's ed not because a car gets from point a to point b but because a car will make them sexy, independent, respected. They have all of next year to realize how wrong they are. Most of them came in like stags at mating season, ready to butt heads. Now they are all wearing thinly veiled looks of annoyance with each other. In America, at least, conformity is the main obsession of men ,especially very young men. And the fact that most men are really nothing alike fuels the mutual dislike hovering around this room.

Blake gets up to ask Zachary is he is gay or not. To my surprise, and this tells me how much thigns have changed since I was a teenager, Zachary says he is, and leaves it at that. In my opionion Zachary's would have done better to invest in acne treatment for him as opposed to driver's ed, but that's just my opinion. His horrible complexion isn't winning him any friends and I can tell things are hard enough for him as they are.

Adam, who is the youngest person in the room, probably, has just turned fifteen and looks like he is already too old for these people, like hiugh school is really a huge waste. I'll miss him, but in the end he's about it. I know I overanalyze. Yes, I know, but I think how there were really only five people worth knowing and I didn't get to know most of them. How it's weird that we live in a place where you can spend two weeks chumming it up with someone and then never see them again.

I remember my friend Amber from back in college: "Chris, I don't know you think I should make friends. As soon as the semester's over we'll never see them again, so what's the point?"

Amber, I'm inclined to agree with you as I ride home on the bus with all of these experiences with all of these people I shared a life and close quarters with for two weeks who I will never see again.

I have jsut come off the bus and am coming down Notre Dame Avenue when I look up and see Matt standing their in his jeans and his thin shirt walking a chocolate lab bigger than himself. He is my neighbor. For two years now I've seen him pass by my window and up my block wondering what kind of kid he was. He was one of the only ones I didn't know. A year ago he came into Sacred Heart looking sort of vacant and I allowed him into the pew where we were sitting. But I don't think I've ever heard him speak. There has always been a great gulf of me the much older and he the much younger. Today he is standing there with his dog, looking at me, waiting.

He sat across from me in driver's ed.

And I am reminded that in my field, when I star school in the fall I am like to have Adam's mother for a professor and maybe Spencer's father. And maybe the whole point of it is that you don't know what leads to what. You don't know what the B is that comes after A. You just know that here is life, and you have got to live it. Hopefully with joy, and if you do a million surprises can come your way.