Cathy and I have been watching reruns of the old sitcom, My Three Sons, which first aired in 1960. At that time, I would have been around the same age as the youngest son, Chip, so watching the show has been a bit nostalgic for me. I remember the toys and board games I see on the show. I remember the haircuts and the clothing styles. I remember the customs. The show’s suburban setting reminds me of 1963, the year my mother took a teaching position in Oak Forest, Illinois, on the southern edge of Chicagoland, and for six years we came as close as we ever would to living the sort of life the Douglas family did on My Three Sons. We left our farm in southern Illinois and rented an apartment in Oak Forest. It was such a different world. When I walked to school with friends, we sometimes stopped at a local bakery for whatever treats caught our eyes. When we headed down 159^th Street, we signaled for semi drivers to sound their horns, and often they obliged. Starting in the fourth grade, I played biddy basketball which eventually led to a place for me on my middle school team. My parents came to all my games. Even though we spent our summers back on our farm, I was already starting to identify with the lifestyle we had in Oak Forest.

The spring I was graduating from the eighth grade, my parents felt they had to make a decision. Should they stay in Oak Forest for my high school years, or would it be better for my mother to retire from teaching and to move back downstate? I remember going with my parents to look at a few houses that were for sale. They were in the newer subdivisions; some of them weren’t even fully constructed. The lots had no sod, the roofs needed to be finished, the concrete driveways were yet to be poured. Our farmhouse had no running water. It had a large country kitchen with a pump by the sink, a living room with a fuel oil heating stove, a front bedroom, another bedroom that had been added at some point, a pantry, and a wash porch. When we came to Oak Forest, it was the first time I’d had a bathroom inside the house. The apartment we rented was a one-bedroom with a kitchen, living room, and bath. Even from my vantage point on a sleeper sofa, it seemed luxurious, but these newly built homes? They were beyond anything I could ever have imagined my parents and I owning. They must have had trouble imagining it, too, because they decided to go back downstate where I began my freshman year at a school with an enrollment of around 140 students.

From time to time, I wonder what my life might have been like had we stayed in Oak Forest. I think about what academic and athletic and artistic opportunities I might have had. Maybe if I’d been challenged more, I might have risen faster. Who’s to say? All I know is I felt at home there, and I remember the sadness of leaving. On one of the final days of school, I remember an assembly where the graduating eighth graders could speak to representatives from the high school about various extracurricular activities. I remember sitting on the floor of the gym, my back against the wall, while my basketball teammates lined up to speak to the high school coach.

“I figured you’d be with them,” one of my non-basketball-playing friends said to me.

“It’s no use,” I said. “We’re moving.”

When you’re young, you have little to say about the direction your life takes. Other people make those decisions for you. So the day came when my parents and I drove away from Oak Forest forever. I left my friends and my girlfriend behind, and I left whatever life I might have had. This isn’t to say I object to the life I had in a small downstate town. After all, those years have informed so much of my writing. Still, I wonder, as I imagine many of you do either with your own lives or the lives of your characters, what would have happened if my parents hadn’t made the decision to leave. It’s funny I should be thinking of such things here a month before my sixty-ninth birthday, but maybe it’s exactly the right time to look back and to wonder about the path not taken.

All it takes is for me to see one of the boys on My Three Sons wearing a shirt with a button on the back of the collar, or a pair of chinos, or penny loafers, or high-top Chuck Taylors, to take me back to that time of my life when I stood between one world and another with no agency to determine which I might prefer. That wasn’t my job. I was just a kid. I’d have to make do with whatever my parents decided, not knowing their choice would produce a longing that still exists just beneath the surface. What longings do you or your characters have? How can you use unfulfilled desire in a narrative? What if you began with this: I always wonder what might have happened if. . . .” Or, to make this more pointed toward a piece of fiction, Loretta always wondered what might have happened if. . . .

Let that awareness of a life offered but not realized propel your narrative.