A few weeks back I took our family dog, Lucy, with me on a long walk on a quiet dirt road. The afternoon was warm without being hot, and thanks to overnight rain, the road was not dusty. Although we never stopped, we had no reason to hurry. As a summer afternoon for a man and his dog, it was close to perfect.
Like many roads in our town, this one peters out without ever crossing another road, so a walker or runner must eventually turn around, a mild disappointment for someone who prefers a loop to retracing his steps; but miles are abstractions for someone deep in thought and only minimally aware of the trees and birds, of the deep blue sky, and the talcum smell of blooming milkweed.
The sound of an automobile on a quiet road can change a walker’s channel from abstract to real, and this is what happened to me, just once on this perfect afternoon. To complete the picture I should add that although she is blind, Lucy prefers walking off-leash.
Not just an automobile this afternoon, but an automobile behind me and a bicycle ahead, coming uphill in a struggle I didn’t want to interrupt. I clipped Lucy to the leash I had been carrying around my neck, pulled her off the road to make room, and as we four crossed the same spot in the universe at precisely the same moment, my thinking veered in a new direction.
My life, all our lives for that matter, are punctuated with moments like this, some random and a few phenomenal, some trivial and some consequential, all of them moments where we have no significant control.
I met my wife this way at a bonfire the night before a college football game when we both were with other people. She recognized me because she knew my sisters and my mother from her boarding school, and she introduced herself. Two and a half years later we were married. Nearly 60 years later — two children and four grandchildren — our life has, in retrospect, the shape of destiny, but in truth it owes a lot to random luck.
There must be an archetype at work, the way we human beings look back over our lives and marvel, ” If not for this….” Coincidences, some just amusing and others serendipitous, happen every day. When bad luck turns good, we say wisely, “It was the best thing that could have happened to me.” Whether this is truth or rationalization, survival to a ripe old age seems to require a string of near misses, like driving in traffic, that turn out just right.
And then there are times when events coincide with real consequences. On July 2, 1898, my grandfather, a 9-year-old boy at the time, was supposed to depart New York City on the ship La Borgogne with his father, bound for Le Havre where they would join his mother and sister in Europe. A case of chickenpox intervened, and my grandfather stayed behind under the care of an uncle while his father set out on the planned trip. Two days later La Bourgogne collided with the English ship Cromartyshire and sank near Sable Island, Newfoundland. My great-grandfather, along with most of the passengers, drowned.
Good luck and bad luck in one stroke for a 9-year-old boy. For most of my life I’ve thought of this intriguing story from my grandfather’s perspective, imagining (he never spoke of this matter to me) his sharpening awareness as he waited for his mother and sister to return from Europe, that he would grow up without a father. I always thought it explained his stolid manner. Then, a few years ago I heard my son say at a family dinner with three generations at the table, “If not for a case of chickenpox, none of us would be here.”
Well, yes, but it’s a bit of a parlor trick to think this way. The consciousness you use to imagine and rue not being born wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t been born. There would be no you to feel sad about and no you to do the feeling. And yet, this kind of absurd thinking is at the heart of what makes us human.
It can start with an automobile, a bicycle, and a man and a dog briefly lined up perfectly on a dirt road in Vermont, and it can go anywhere.
As a coincidence, this dirt road alignment was pretty ordinary. I used to run a lot, most of those miles in a Massachusetts town with so many streets and options, it was possible to run a different 10-mile loop every day for a week.
A few of those loops included a sequence where a street crossed a bridge and immediately entered a tunnel beneath railroad tracks. On the far side of the tunnel the streets made a “T” where cars could approach from three directions. For a runner, the tunnel was the tricky part because cars going in opposite directions took up most of the space.
One day as I crossed the bridge, a pair of kayaks passed beneath me, and as I entered the tunnel with two cars abreast, a freight train rumbled along the tracks overhead. Two kayaks, two cars, a train and a runner, all at the same time!
When I got safely through the tunnel, I stopped to appreciate what had just happened. In the sky right above me a jet coming from Logan airport turned and headed toward Europe.
Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.