I Know Who I Want to Be :: Personal Narrative Essays

I Know Who I Want to Be I would not have cared about being eliminated from the Rhodes Scholarship competition if I had known that was the last day I'd see Lee Stone alive. It was almost a coincidence that I saw him at all--I was home for the state round of the Rhodes, my interview was three blocks from where my parents were meeting him for lunch and I figured, almost on a whim, that I might as well stop by. So I walked over with my mom, exchanged hugs with Lee, his wife Judy and his parents, and gave a nervous run-down of my interview. Lee was, as always, in good spirits, cracking jokes and wishing me luck. I was probably there less than 15 minutes. The Rhodes competition has this sadistic element in that they tell you the same day whether or not you make the cut. The 12 of us, (or was it 14?), sat nervously in a corporate law office board room that afternoon, until the panel came in and read off the names. We non-finalists all kind of smiled weakly and slunk out to the elevators. I was duly devastated, but also strangely embarrassed that I cared. Eight days later, I came home from an obscure conversation with an old friend to discover my parents and little brother wide awake at 12:33 a.m. I heard them coming down the hall from the kitchen, and there was this note on the front hall table about Lee, a hospital, calling someone. I couldn't decipher my brother's distinctly male-14-year-old handwriting before my mother said, "Lee had another heart attack." "Oh my God..." "It's worse," she said. "He's dead." I've known the Stones for 17 years--since Judy was pregnant with their daughter Laura, who's now a senior in high school, and I was four and a half. The Stone family spent their summers down the street from my family in Long Island, and I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons with Laura's two older brothers. In all our family gatherings, Lee was the center of the excitement. He led countless water ski expeditions, starred in neighborhood dramatic productions and permeated every event with his wry sense of humor. I can vividly remember the afternoon he and I got stranded on an intermediate trail far too difficult for my fourth-day-ever on skis.