by John Sheirer

Like so many other young people, I left home at eighteen never to return. The little farm in Pennsylvania that had nurtured me is long since a part of my past. I made a few visits back there over the years, of course, but after I ventured off to college, then graduate school, then the work world, the place where I grew up was no longer home.

But once, in 1987, after I had my master’s degree but was having enormous difficulty finding a teaching job, I sat in my little efficiency apartment preparing to go to my job at a fast-food restaurant called the "French Fry Factory." I could see the apartment’s dirt basement through the kitchen floorboards. I had no girlfriend and no car, I went to my minimum-wage job by city bus, and the rent was due the next day. So I indulged myself in a little fantasy about what my life could have been like if I had stayed in Pennsylvania instead of leaving for college as soon as I possibly could.

When I was thirteen, I realized for the first time that I would not stay in the place where I’d always lived my life to that point. A friend at school asked me if I was going to "take over the farm" someday. I couldn’t even imagine doing that, but what else was there for me if I stayed? Would I have worked at a factory down the road in Cumberland, Maryland, like a few of my classmates’ older brothers? Would I have started some kind of business? What the hell did I know about business? Would I have just stayed at home until my parents begged me to leave?

Probably I would have borrowed a few dollars from my parents after high school graduation and moved to Bedford (the big town twenty miles up the road) to get whatever kind of job there was—washing dishes in a restaurant, waxing the floor at the roller-rama, or bagging groceries at the Giant Eagle (pronounced "Jant Igg-uhl" by the natives). I supposed jobs like these existed in the late 1970s, but somehow in 1987, I had trouble imagining them.

Then I thought that maybe I should have put off going to college and worked at the Bedford Gazette newspaper for a few years instead, maybe picking up a class now and then at Allegheny Community College in Cumberland. I probably would have started in the newspaper’s print shop, getting sweaty and grimy day after day, going back to my boarding house room each night to scrub the ink stains from my hands and ignore the country music played all night on tinny transistor radios by my drunken housemates. I would have been known as "Hey Kid," by all the older workers at the paper, but they would have quickly learned that I could work as hard as any of them, thanks to my upbringing on the farm.

One day I would have made a point of running into the youngest reporter there, probably a guy no more than ten years older than I was, on the way to the parking lot. I’d start slowly, just saying hi and smiling. After a week or so, I’d start a conversation—an easy topic such as sports. He’d be impressed that I knew a few of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ batting averages. He might even remember me from last year’s basketball game against Bedford. "You’re the kid who played defense and rebounded, aren’t you?"

Eventually, we might sit together at lunch, and he’d notice that I could speak pretty articulately about why Carter wasn’t nearly as bad a president as everyone seemed to think. Before long, he’d come around to the question I wanted him to ask all along: "Why is a smart kid like you working in the print shop instead of going to college?" I’d tell him that I was saving my money and taking some community college classes, but I was actually hoping to try my hand at writing for the paper someday. It would turn out that he had a throw-away assignment—maybe some obscure regulation up for debate at a town meeting or the obligatory obituary—and he’d throw it my way.

"Do good work on this one, kid," he’d say, "and there may be more."

I wouldn’t just do good work—I would do better work than he’d ever seen. He’d get me a meeting with a junior editor, get me some part-time assignments. I’d keep working in the print shop and do the assignments in my free time until they’d beg me to joint the staff as a full-time reporter, the pay three times as much as I made in the print shop, writing about anything I wanted to.

I’d make enough money to get a reliable car and move from my boarding house to the old hunter’s cabin on our farm, where I would install a real bathroom, doing all the work myself with advice from my dad. I’d finish my associate’s degree at Allegheny, then commute to Penn State part-time to earn my bachelor’s and master’s in journalism. Within a few years, I’d be a junior editor at the paper and buy the farm from my parents, letting them live there as long as they liked, rent free. They would swell with pride at how well I was repaying them for all their work and expense in raising me. When I was making big money as editor-in-chief of the paper at age thirty, I’d send them on vacations wherever they wanted to go.

Meanwhile, I’d no longer be the nerdy high school kid who didn’t date. Maturity and success would make me more attractive, and I’d be the most eligible bachelor in the county. Gale Willison, my unrequited high school love, would return from college to teach first grade at Hyndman Primary, the same school where her mother Sylva was the head teacher. We’d have a long courtship, marry when we were thirty-three, honeymoon in the Australian outback, live together in the cabin, and buy back all of the property on the neighboring mountain that had been purchased from my family decades before. We would stay thin and athletic and sexy by climbing that mountain one hundred times a year.

By the time I was forty, the local Democratic Party would recruit me to run for congress against the long-term incumbent Republican. But I’d turn them down because was happy with my position as editor of the paper. My weekly columns would win the Pulitzer Prize, then be collected into a bestseller that would win the National Book Award. And my behind-the-scenes work would help get a Democrat elected to congress for the first time in decades.

The question of whether or not Gale and I would have kids was the only part of my fantasy I hadn’t quite figured out when the phone rang to pull me back to my apartment in 1987. I was surprised that the phone still worked considering how long it had been since I had paid the bill. My student loan company was calling. They wanted to know when I was going to pay back the $25,000 I borrowed to get the master’s degree that wasn’t getting me a teaching job. I told them that John had died a few months ago ... yes it was very sad ... he had all that potential that could never be fulfilled.

Of course, things might have gone differently if I had stayed in Pennsylvania. I might have married some local gal who put on two hundred pounds after having seven kids in five years and who continued to get pregnant each time I so much as smiled at her. The boys would be in juvenile detention centers by the time they were thirteen, and the girls would be pregnant by fifteen. I’d be a grandfather several times over by age thirty-five. When I hit forty, the police would be hauling my grandchildren to my house because they would already be shoplifting and breaking windows in the school. I would have ballooned up to three hundred pounds myself from the stress of constant near-foreclosure on the farm because all of my llamas had been swept away in a freak flood ... three times.

And I wouldn’t even have a creative outlet for expressing my troubles because I wouldn’t live in a trailer-park, so even Jerry Springer wouldn’t invite me to be a guest on his show.

John Sheirer teaches public speaking, writing, and literature at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut. His writing has been published widely in print and on the internet, and he is the author of a public speaking guidebook, Shut Up and Speak!, a collection of poems, Saying My Name: Selected Poems, 1982-2002, and a book of essays, Free Chairs. He is currently completing a memoir, Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere.