"Can you help me with my calculus homework?"

I remember the tenor of her voice and its barely audible quiver when she asked me that. I remember the time (about eight PM), the place (the computer room in our high school), and why we were there (our school was hosting a debate tournament and we were assigned to tabulate the scores).

We define the crossroads of our lives as those moments when we choose which school to attend, which course of study to pursue, or which city to live in. These moments are sterile and packaged, arriving without surprise at pre-determined intervals and are accompanied with all the pageantry--parties, ceremonies, costumes, and hors d'oeuvres--that we think a major turning point deserves. However, if we look back honestly and consider which decisions actually made a difference, really shaped the men and women we grow into, I contend that it is comical how far off we are. Would it really have made a difference whether I had gone to a public university instead of private, or whether I'd lived in New York instead of Boston, or whether my major was sociology instead of philosophy? In retrospect there's nothing that makes me think that these decisions deserve the gravity and anxiety that they inspire in millions of the young across the world.

This simple question by Sally, and my simple choice of responding "yes" or "no", defined the only meaningful crossroad I can think of in my life. It is a practical joke constructed by God himself that the decisions that do matter, that change us and change everything we care about, are disguised so innocently, so nakedly, in such plain language in an even plainer context. Maybe God's intentions are to keep secret the weight of these important choices so He can see how we act and choose when we are ourselves, uncoached and unprepared.

The request came my junior year of high school. It was clear that Sally was choking on pride as she said it. I wondered what sorts of internal arguments had taken place in her mind just prior to the moment she worked up the nerve to ask me. Truthfully, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go to her home, sit beside her, and look over her shoulder as she wrote her equations with bubbly hand-writing, so inappropriate for the austere work of calculus.

She offered to pay me quite a bit for my help. Her father was rich, and he had made his fortune by franchising a series of Texaco gas stations throughout our city. He was never around, waking up before dawn and shuttling between the stations to hire, fire, oversee, underwrite, develop, shut down, scale up, scale down, and otherwise administrate his miniature petroleum empire. Sally, her sister, and mother were the only ones who actually benefitted from all this spent energy, living lavishly and entertaining themselves with Vuitton bags and Saks cashmere sweaters. He himself was content to come home to a fifteen year old twelve-inch television sitting askew in front of a twenty year old cloth armchair. The television didn't work very well and there was a noticeable layer of static in front of the image. I really admired that for all the years I knew him, as he accumulated more millions, he never replaced that television.

But, it was not his world that I was entering, it was Sally's, her sister Samantha's, and her mother Serena's. I drove up to their mini-mansion in my grey Honda Civic, which by then was as old as her father's tv, wondering whether its presence would upset the neighbors. I had told Sally that I would be happy to help her out without payment; I never had had much use for money then, and I still believed with naivete that charging someone for a service was somehow crude and indecent. And then suddenly, the contrast between my car and her neighborhood, her house, her racks of designer clothes, changed me just a bit.

I've mentioned in a previous post that there are certain indicators we use to judge people because they are convenient to measure and align with the values of the times. This was the point at which I, like millions before me, started thinking about money in those terms. And it encouraged me, on some subconscious level, to believe that this is what everyone else did, that Sally's world was the real world for which I had been searching. It was lost on me that Sally's father did not inhabit her world, and yet, he was the only fully real person in the family.