For the future is gated, and there are tolls to be paid.

          Oh, what a wondrous sentence.  I tripped over it at the terminus of the short fiction, We Show What We Have Learned.  Although the metaphorical story (written by Clare Beams) was deftly crafted, it was her insightfully essomenic bumper-post sentence which brought me pause. 

          I paid my first toll exactly thirty years ago.  Up to that point I'd been clumsily sketching together a future which included a degree in art followed by a job which would utilize my creativity.  I'd been tracing my future on the skein of selfish privilege in the ridiculous naïveté of youth (qualities, both invisible in the mirror but soon to become extremely clear in my backlight).  Inside the echo of a single conversation in February of '82, I permitted my future to be shanghaied and—subsequently—dropped out of college, joined the army, and became an infantryman.

          Navigating through life's toll gates must be something of a forte; adapt or become trapped.