Have you ever wondered

What happened to your childhood friends and playmates?

I was wondering about some of mine recently and discovered that a) the women are hard to find, what with name changes and all and b) sometimes your worst predictions about someone come true.

I was feeling melancholy and started poking around on Google, looking up the boys next door. Well, one I can't find at all. This makes me wonder what has happened to him or if I've completely forgotten how his name is spelled. It also reminds me that someone mentioned (oh, a decade ago) that he might have died. Or run away from the mob or something equally bizarre.

Another friend has turned out badly. He's doing hard time somewhere in FL for mail fraud. You know, I knew that boy would go bad when he started selling drugs during my first year in college. He wasn't doing the drugs, he was "just" selling them for the money. Because it was fast and easy. Now mind you, we didn't grow up that hard pressed for cash in Queens that he had any...uh...good? reason to be selling drugs. We were middle or lower middle class. No one was starving, he had both parents in his life and his younger brother. He even tried to drag his younger brother into it, but something happened to change the younger brother's mind about it.

I don't know what it was and my ego isn't so outsized that I think it was my hysterical reaction and hollering session during one of my breaks from college. My best friend told me what was going on and the two of us together went to town on the two of them. The memory of that confrontation is kind of fuzzy, but I was really upset and I remember the elder brother saying that drugged up people deserved what they got and he was just making money on them on their way down.

Wow.

That was the end of that relationship, for me!

Over the course of the next several years I heard about him on and off from my friend - something about getting a girl pregnant, insisting on an abortion and then getting her pregnant again. I never said the girl was smart, either, since he didn't treat her well, but it's all part and parcel of his downward spiral.

Fast forward to a month ago when I found out his ultimate destination. Wow. Not very surprising, really, but wow. His younger brother, however, appears to be doing just fine in the music recording industry and is just as cute now as he was then.

Here's my question: Is it possible to stop a friend's downward spiral? What if, for instance, I'd been brave enough to tell my parents or his parents what was going on? I had no proof, mind you, so that and parental denial might have been a problem.

Have you ever faced a similar situation? How do I teach Caitlin to come to me if one of her friends (later, MUCH later in life) is going down the same path?