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| Me no doubt asking a firefighter to help me blow this pop-stand before it blows again. |
I don't recall either event, but according to my mother, both blasts were real doozies.
The first happened in our basement before I was two years-old. The furnace blew, the explosion so powerful, the kitchen floor heaved up and the cast iron door on the unit's face flew off.
Firefighters traipsed through the house where I sat in a rocking chair calmly watching.
"Why didn't anyone carry me out?" I recently asked my mother.
"Well, we looked at you and you seemed fine," she said.
A couple of years later I had a second brush with a blast. My father was a building engineer. Every day, I went with my mother to pick him up from work. My routine: open the boiler room door, scamper over an iron catwalk, bear right onto another catwalk, then run into the tiny office where my father waited.
One day I was sick and my mother's timing was off, getting her to my father's job later than usual. At precisely the time I would have been running up that first catwalk, a boiler exploded. Had I been there, I'd have been killed, with 40 pounds of ragamuffin meat hurled to the cold, hard floor.
My mother was uninjured due in part to the shift in her arrival time. My father survived because he was far enough away in his office.
Had I been closer to the basement that one day, or calumphing my fanny up that catwalk on the other, I wouldn't be here now and my children wouldn't exist.
My ex-husband would never have met me, making him and his mother the only ones to gain anything.
Similar subject matter has been explored before, of course. Consult your television viewing guide during the holidays and you'll see some channel somewhere is airing It's a Wonderful Life, the story of downhearted George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) shown by a fledgling angel how barren others' lives would be had he not been around.
We see that theme of altered existence in the story, A Christmas Carol, too, when Ebineezer Scrooge is shown the bleak fate set to befall that sickeningly chipper Cratchett clan should he not change his ways.
But what about the good things that never happen to us because we zigged instead of zagged, or worse, the good things that never happen to us because others zigged? We are all the sum total, not only of our own decisions, but of others'.
What windfalls, career boosts and loves have I missed due to my decisions? Last-second impulses to turn right and not left, polite rejections of would-be suitors, or not sending a resume to that hot little start-up are choices. Those choices, once escorts to alternate futures, stand as vague and shadowed sentries, barring gates they would otherwise open.
And when things happen . . . or don't happen . . . is it fate, good luck, bad luck, a higher power or merely the simple order of things?
Before I decide that it's all a mess of randomness, I will give this notion more thought.
I just won't expect any conclusions.
