The Roundabout

THE ROUNDABOUT

By

G. Leigh Lyons

     

I did not know it when I reached it, but it was there, right in front of me. It was a metaphorical roundabout and I arrived there in my twenty year old beat-up jalopy of a career. I was on my way to a new career dealer, to Harvard Business School. At HBS I would buy a new career vehicle, a powerful one - the Advanced Management Program, model 167.     

So I entered the roundabout and followed the signs to the most hallowed of new career dealerships. There were four options once you entered the roundabout: the first one, to the right, would take me off in a new direction, but I’d still be driving the jalopy. The second, straight across from where I’d entered it, would take me to the dealership. The third was where I intended to go after buying my brand-spanking new career vehicle. And, of course, there was the road I’d just come from – back to where I’d been driving around for the last twenty years.

I negotiated the coughing and wheezing jalopy past the first turnoff. I was tempted, don’t get me wrong. If I went down that road, I would be in my element. My jalopy may not have been pretty, and it may have back-fired every now and then, but I knew it and it had always gotten me to where I wanted to go eventually. The jalopy hadn’t always been dented. It hadn’t always left a trail of blue smoke pouring out of the rusted muffler. When I first bought it, it was a cherry. I bought it in Santa Cruz, California. Powered by a state-of-the-art bachelor’s in Geology, it was fast. I got in the driver’s seat and peeled out on the straightaway of a new career. I screamed past streets with names like First Oil Well, Promotion to Management, and Vice-Presidency. Every now and then I would come up on a major intersection with a street light. At the beginning of my trip, for some reason, the light would always be green and I would just blast past. I’d barely have time to see the names of those major intersections in my rearview mirror – Year One, Year Two. Then the street lights started turning yellow and I’d briefly think about heeding the warning, but I never did. I just kept on barreling through them, like a teenager on his way with his girlfriend to Lover’s Lane. Year Ten Street, Year Fifteen Place flashed by in my peripheral vision.

And then? And then, the lights started turning red and I’d have to stop at the intersections. By now my vehicle was old and dated. I usually had to goose the un-tuned engine to keep it running while I waited for the light to turn green. I’d curse at it. I knew that it needed work. I knew that I needed to take it in and change the oil, maybe replace some parts. It was running hot all the time. People would laugh and point at it as they whizzed past me on their way to where I wanted to go, but they always got there first. By the time I arrived on the scene, the pickings were pretty slim. I was idling at Year Twenty Avenue when I saw the sign on the building across the street.

‘Revitalize your used career vehicle at our dealership – Come to Harvard Business School and drive away in a new 2004 AMP167.’

I had made up my mind, then and there.

And so I passed on by the first turnoff of the roundabout and took the second one; the one to the dealership. The salesmen were slick. They spent a lot of time with me. They introduced me to a lot of other people who’d come to trade-in their old vehicles for new AMP167’s. My old jalopy was easily the oldest and most beat-up of the trade-ins, and I felt vaguely embarrassed, but I loved that old junker. ‘Old Yeller’ had been there for me, through thick and thin, but it was time to put him down and move on. I drove out of the dealership in my shiny AMP167, filled with pride, full of vim and vigor. The world was my oyster. I headed back to the turnabout.

I entered the turnabout again and took the first turnoff, positive with my decision in every sense. I put the pedal to the metal and roared off in the fast lane of the Autobahn of the Future. I got to Venture Capital City in no time and took the off ramp to downtown. I drifted the corners. My tires squealed and left tire marks all over the place. The citizens noticed me and pointed at my new ride - thumbs ups and waving with smiles. I passed almost all the other vehicles being sure to wink condescendingly at the other drivers when I came up next to them. But things started to change in no time. Downtown Venture Capital had fallen on bad times. I started driving around honking my horn to get noticed, but there wasn’t anybody on the road anymore to take notice. Every now and then I’d see a pedestrian on the sidewalk, but they didn’t smile and wave anymore. Thumbs-up turned into finger-up. I wasn’t welcome. They didn’t want me. They had their own problems.

I went back to the Autobahn, tears of rejection running down my cheeks. My eyes were blurry with the salty water of failure and I missed seeing the onramp to Entrepreneurville and Small Businesston. Instead, I headed back the way I came from, in the direction of the turnabout. I got caught in a huge traffic jam and it seemed like it took me months to reach it. It gave me a lot of time to think, but try as I may, I really didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. At least I’d been able to gas up the tank, and the trunk was full of groceries, so my stay in VC City had at least given me enough to live on for a while. It wasn’t a total loss.

I finally reached the turnabout. Almost all of the vehicles before me had taken the turnoff directly across from me, and those that didn’t had headed back to the dealership to trade-in for new vehicles that could navigate the off-road conditions of the unknown beyond the Autobahn. I could see some of them now, in their new four-wheel drive, V-8, snorkel-fitted off-road career vehicles, headed for the wild frontier of a new economic reality. They headed in a steady stream, back up the Autobahn. Not one of them had taken the turn-off that led back to where it had all started. But I did.

I headed back down the road of my past life. I ignored the signs that said ‘One Way’, ‘Do Not Enter’ and ‘Wrong Way’. The Career Police started chasing me in their progressively vintage vehicles, but they didn’t stand a chance of catching me in my speedy AMP. It made me smile, mostly, when I passed those places I’d visited before. Awash in nostalgia, I zoomed back in time; past Year Twenty Avenue, Year Ten Street. I lost track of time, lost in my thoughts and my memories. Before I knew it, my AMP167 was bumping and bouncing over a puddle-filled dirt road surrounded on sides by the jungle growth of my childhood home in Venezuela. I knew exactly where I was. It all came back to me as if it were yesterday. I drove over the cattle guard and into Campo Mata, the oil field camp that had been my home for the first ten years of my life. I drove past the nine-hole golf course, the Commissary, the Clinic and past the Texaco offices where my Dad had worked. I pulled into the gravel driveway of my old home and parked the AMP under the open awning where my Dad used parked his 1965 Ford Falcon company car. I didn’t go inside the house. Instead I headed across the clearing behind the house, through the barbed-wire fence that marked the edge of the camp and the beginning of the wild untamed jungle that surrounded Campo Mata. I could not wipe the smile from my face. This was where I belonged. I had never wanted to leave in the first place. And now that I was back, I would never leave.

I walked into the jungle and down the path that I had used so many times growing up. That stupid monkey was still there screaming at me from his perch high up in the Kapok tree. The ferns were wet and the ground was muddy from a recent rain shower. I took my Gucci’s off and tossed them into the lush underbrush, followed by my argyle socks, my starched Brooks Brothers dress shirt and the keys to the AMP. I wouldn’t need those things anymore, not where I was going. My heart raced as I got closer to it. And then I came to the clearing and set my eyes on it for the first time in forty years - the tree house in the Mango Tree.

I climbed up the planks that Billy and I had nailed into the trunk those many decades ago and into the club house. Everything was there. The comic books stacked in the corner and the jars full of all kinds of jungle bugs and creatures we’d collected. The holsters with the cap guns hung from their nails on the wall. The Louis L’Amour westerns and even the old Playboy magazines that Todd had stolen from his parents were where we’d left them. Of course, the room seemed a lot smaller to me now, but it didn’t matter. It was just right. I sat down cross-legged on the wood floor. The breeze brushed through the single open window of the tree house, flipping the first page of a Spiderman comic on top of the stack next to me. I was home again, where I belonged, where I wanted to be.

I picked up the pad of blank paper, a yellow chewed up pencil, and began to write. It is what I would be doing for the rest of my life - my little foible. It was, I realized, what I should have been doing from the beginning. It’s just that it had taken me this long to figure it out. I had driven down the road of convention, headed in the direction everyone thought I should, including me. And then I got to the roundabout and the rest was history.