I was working my way through "War and Remembrance" tonight when I came across a scene that was particularly poignant, even though it didn't have a lot to do with the main plot.

Rhoda Henry, the long-time wife of the main character, is having trouble sleeping, so she goes downstairs and puts a record on the phonograph. While she smokes a cigarette and looks at faded pictures from when she was a young wife, she listens to a scratchy recording of a song she loved when she was still young and full of dreams. At this point in the story, she has lost one of her two sons in the war and her marriage is falling apart.

You can almost see her thinking that things really didn't turn out the way she always thought they would.

[caption id="attachment_1164" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Rhoda with Palmer Kirby"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/402954.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1164" title="402954" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/402954-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

Do they for anyone?

Does anyone reach 50 anymore and look back to see the steps of their life lined up exactly the way they planned them when they were 17?

When I look at the lives of my closest friends, I'm pretty certain that most of them didn't quite wind up with what they planned.

I have one friend who may be the most talented person I know. He works as hard as anyone I know, but he hasn't had a full-time job with benefits for more than 10 years. I have written this before, but I'll say it again. Three of my four closest friends have gone through personal bankruptcies. Nobody plans for that.

Two of my closest friends never had children, and I can only imagine how much less wonderful my life would have been without Pauline and Virgile.

At least none of my friends are alone in the world. All either have wives or are living with women in committed relationships. I certainly can't even imagine at this point what it would be like to be alone at age 61 and beyond.

I was certainly disappointed that after about 20 good years, my career as a journalist suffered through setbacks and then termination because I wound up working for people who weren't competent.I was out of work at 58, right at the worst time possible to be out of work. I became one of the 99ers, the folks who collected unemployment for nearly two years but couldn't find work.

Go figure.

But it's still too early for a retrospective. There are still things I hope to accomplish, people I want to meet, places I want to go.

Just because little of it was what I planned when I was young, that doesn't make it worse.

It just means maybe I didn't have the best plan back then.

Hey, who does?

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