My first friends in this southern town are students at a college of art and design. We meet at the dog park in the early evening, complain about the cloying heat and share snippets of our lives. We are all from someplace else: Nebraska, New Hampshire, Chicago, Miami. We miss it there. But none of us is planning to return.

This week, with graduation days away, nostalgia has been supplanted by talk of the future. Aaron will work as a photographer's assistant in San Francisco. Leslie and Mike are moving to Austin. Kelly, who majored in Fibers and needed help with her artist's statement, will live with friends in Carmel and haunt the galleries there. 

I'll stay here and choke on envy. 

My young friends are like cool cars being tuned for a road trip. I'm the chassis of a Dodge Dart, set on concrete blocks in a weedy side yard. 

I was like you once, I want to say and don't. A fresh new talent. The flavor of the month. I too was faced with a recession but confident that it wouldn't slow me down. And it didn't. It didn't!  I was that good... and unencumbered. When you're twenty and can live on next-to-nothing plus a credit card, you are infinitely hireable. Life is eager to fulfill your dreams. Make them good ones. Make them count.  

When the conversation turns to dinner and pizza, I leap back in on the side of thin and crispy. Our dogs race and wrestle. A humid breeze keeps the sand gnats at bay.

There is a favorite old chick flick called The Turning Point, set in the ballet world. It stars Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine as former friends and rivals negotiating the unpleasant territory of envy and regret. One woman's daughter has become both women's hope for the future. She has suffered her first heartbreak at the hands of a young Barishnikov, and earned her first standing ovation from a New York audience. In the final scene, MacLaine and Bancroft stand backstage and watch their little ballerina dance for joy.

"If only she knew everything we know now."

"It wouldn't matter a damn."

The girl dances. Dazzled by the spotlight,  taunting the shadows, she dances on.