The Old Neighborhood

Lizzie needed her rain boots that she left at home in her closet. She also needed a casserole for a dish she wants to try. I needed to see her so I arranged to pick her up after her shift at work. The restaurant she works at is in the neighborhood that I grew up in. Being in a major metropolitan area, it really looks very different than when I was a teenager here. With both my parents having been long deceased, I almost never come here. But as much as the surface has changed, the structure remains the same. Driving down North Druid Hills road I passed a homeless guy standing on a corner. It was Bud. It made me sad to see him. When we were growing up Bud was a sweet and intelligent child, blonde hair and huge blue eyes. He looked like the kids you would see in advertisements. He knew the names of the constellations and where to find them in the sky during which month. He knew the phases of the moon and was hugely interested in eclipses and meteor showers. He read Richards Almanac and the Whole Earth Catalog and National Geographic and stories like "My Side of the Mountain" and "Rin Tin Tin".  He had visited Costa Rico and Bolivia, and had climbed pyramids. He was probably the most interesting kid that I knew. We remained good friends until around 9th grade when Bud began to do strange things. He took up the habit of chirping like a cricket at the most annoying times. He would just suddenly pinch people for no reason and began talking about strange topics. It didn't take long for him to loose most of his friends. He was a good deal smarter than I was, so we weren't in any of the same classes. It was easy to move on to other friends. He graduated with honors, but his mother declined making him the Valedictorian for the class. She said that he couldn't stand the pressure. Looking back on it, she was probably right. He got into Georgia Tech, but by the middle of the first semester of college, I heard he'd had a mental break and was in the hospital. Thinking about it now, he probably was suffering from Schizophrenia or Tourettes or something. We knew very little about mental illness back then, as teenagers we wouldn't have known that our friend was sick, not seeking attention in idiot ways. So now when I come back to Brookhaven, I see him wandering the streets. He chooses to be homeless, it's not that he has to be. His mother still has the house he grew up in. She will let him in, but in his sick way of thinking, he prefers the street. I saw him when I was walking the 3Day. I tried to approach him, but he panicked. It was clear that he didn't want contact with anyone, I'd done a bad thing. So now when I see him I try to not make eye contact. A few of our other classmates have seen him too. They say that he talks to no one. They say that his mother occasionally talks him into going into the hospital, but he never stays. After yesterday, seeing him there on the corner was like a punch in the stomach. How do we all get were we are? Is it that we didn't try? Do we really make our own life or do we just drift in the current of life?