June 6, 2007

Chance Meeting

I just saw the movie "Once" and I'm thinking twice about it. It's a marvelous film, one of those low-budget indie flicks that ends up making it big after Sundance. It's the story of a struggling Irish musician who meets a Czech woman on a Dublin street. She's a pianist without a piano. They make music together and magic happens. There is nothing Hollywood about it, thank God. They don't fall into bed, they don't walk off into the sunset together, and they don't make a hit record and move to Nashville.

The movie keeps it real. It's the story of how someone comes into your life for a while and changes you, then moves on. And how very arbitrary these chance meetings are.

It got me thinking about how my interactions with people whom a playwright would call minor characters have changed the course of my life.

For instance, there was Kathi Steele. She lived across from me in my freshman dorm. Kathi taught me to smoke and told me that I was never to smoke more than 3 cigarettes a day or I'd get hooked. Kathi used to sidle up to someone (man or woman, friend or stranger) and whisper seductively, "I'm naked under these clothes." Then she'd throw back her head and laugh.

Someone else might have taught me to smoke-that's not Kathi's contribution to my life story. Kathi talked me into transferring to the University of Arizona because a friend of hers went there and liked it. She had already been accepted as a transfer. In my urgent desire to go anywhere that was not Indiana, this was good enough for me. I talked my best friend Ellen into going with me. We convinced our parents to let us go, not an easy feat. At the last minute, Kathi bagged out on us and went to the University of Michigan, where she had to wear many layers of clothes over her nakedness.

If I hadn't met Kathi, I wouldn't have gone to Arizona. I had never even heard of it (the university, not the state). If I hadn't gone to Arizona, I wouldn't have met the father of my children. You can see where this is going. Someone who went in and out of my life steered me in a whole new direction, leading to the creation of two new human beings who wouldn't have existed otherwise.

Thinking thoughts like this is crazy-making. The "what-ifs" keep piling on top of each other until one realizes that the very randomness of the universe makes it a miracle that any one individual exists at all.

Nobody wants to be the product of a random convergence. Much better to believe in God or Fate or whatever power put Kathi Steele and countless other catalysts into my life. I want someone to be in charge. Someone who makes you go to one place rather than the other. Someone who draws your attention to a particular want ad that is the perfect job for you. Someone who puts a Czech woman in your path who will be your muse. It can't all just be accidental. Someone must be pulling the strings. Otherwise, we all must face the fact that we're naked under our clothes.