The Successful Self and the Person It Left Behind

The slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walked around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I have come across him, yes, I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian, Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put in with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn’t see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chorteles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunder heads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the study little pencil he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you.