Beautiful piece. I think about this a lot - I am of similar age and think about the possibility of having one more child before it is too late and the choice is gone. My logical side says NO - cost, impact on environment and the unbelievable amount of work involved. Heart says YES.
Like most of the Baby Boom generation, I suppose, neither my husband nor I would exist at all if not for World War II. Both of our sets of parents -- our children's grandparents -- were brought together by the churning dislocation visited on their generation by the war.
I highly recommend two novels that are somewhat based on the concept of fate/chance: Kate Atkinson‘s “life after life”
and Paul Auster’s “4 3 2 1”. Both highly acclaimed.
6
While working as a college professor, I had heard about a summer program at a local graduate school of business for an intensive “Executive MBA.” I met with the program’s administrator to ask if I might contact the alumni and learn how they had changed careers. He invited me to enroll, saying classes started the next day. I returned home and told my husband that I wanted to attend. We would have to re-schedule our week at the beach until later in August. I literally said, “This program could change my life. I’ll never know what might have been if I do not take this opportunity.” So, I enrolled; I studied enthusiastically, graduated at the top of the class and changed careers. I never looked back.
6
I think everyone looks back and contemplates what they might have done differently. The compromises, the choices. It might not do the "contemplater" much good, but it may provide wisdom for advising the young.
I lived at home through college and graduate school. It would have been better to go far away, stay there summers and visit family at Christmas. Everything would have turned out way differently.
Or, even younger, age 7 (1959)? when my parents fought incessantly, my mom packed us two suitcases and we made it as far as the train station intending to return to her home town in Arkansas. This from New Jersey. My father intercepted us and we went home. What if he let us go? Life would have become unrecognizable: career, wife, child, friends, accomplishments. Better? Worse? The same? Perhaps all these possibilities are taking place in an infinite number of parallel universes. Pointless speculation I suppose.
7
Three things came to mind upon reading this lovely article....
1) I have wondered if it is even possible for things to have been different. Just because we can CONCEIVE of a different outcome does not mean it was actually possible. Yes, I can conceive of Jennifer Aniston seeing me in passing, falling hopelessly in love with me, and us spending a delightful life together. Alas, while I can conceive it, I know that there are billions of variables that would have to play out just right for such a thing to happen (like my looks improving--or her eyesight diminishing). So it might be that I am actually living in "the best of all possible worlds," since it might indeed be the only one possible!
2) Whenever I go through a season of not being thankful for my marriage, etc., I look at my wonderful son and recall that no other combination on earth would have produced him...except for my wife an I. That restores balance and reminds me that surely it was God's will, even if we don't always get it right.
3) I have an old, black and white picture of me as a 5-year-old child, sitting with my sister and cousin in a plastic swimming pool on my uncle's farm in Tennessee. I zoomed in on my innocent face and spoke to that little fellow that I used to be. I said, with tears, "I hope I haven't let you down."
Yes, that's a bit saccharine, I suppose. But such things move and motivate me. No matter how things have already gone, let's not let down that little child from the past.
19
it would be nice to see when people stopped to identify non-straight hair as "wild" ... thus the reason why we need this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/style/hair-discrimination-new-york-city.html
"For all sad words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
-- J. G. Whittier.
"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.
-- Satchel Paige.
9
@ProBonoPublico
No - it’s not sad when “the might have been” is tragic, and we manage to escape it --at least temporarily.
Yes - we’re all corks swept up in the twists and turns of life’s uncaring, endless and turbulent stream.
In response, we search for a grand plan to make sense of it all, a holy infallable map to guide us, a cookie-cutter cookbook recipe for a delicious & foolproof life.
But all too soon we all wind up in the same cold, dark place. The unique human awareness of our fate is both a blessing and a curse. It involves the ultimate choice and response to the human condition - whether we ”choose life” or wallow & lose ourselves in the nothingness of past and future.
For despite this painful awareness of death, despite being tossed about by fate and fortune, we still find opportunities for real & meaningful moral choices & responses in our daily existence. We choose to act responsibility, or not, for the sake our fellow beings, and ourselves. In the midst of chance & chaos & confusion, we still choose...
With this understanding we try to live life with no regrets, we try to avoid the rocks and whirlpools as best we can, and we try to enjoy & enrich & ennoble the rest of our strange & unpredictable ride.
For there are no unlived lives.
Only lives to live or lose.
As Leonard Cohen once sang:
We are so small between the stars,
so large against the sky,
And lost among the subway crowds
I try to catch your eye…
Thank you for writing this thoughtful piece in such fluid prose.
3
When I read the title of the article I thought it was about abortion. So many lives not lived.
@Nana I thought about abortion, too! If I hadn't managed to get an abortion back in 1965, my father would have been able to keep beating me up and molesting me, because I'd have been forced to drop out of college and live with him, (I was 18) while raising the product of rape.
I'd been so happy to escape to college, 3000 miles away, thanks to a stunning score on the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test! I'd been making a life for myself at last. To have all that derailed by a date rape would have destroyed me.
I would never have gone on to meet a certain fantastic guy in grad school, marry him, and still be happily married (with two kids and two grandkids) nearly 50 years later.
My life would have gone unlived.
26
Opportunities missed, opportunities taken. Great regret comes from the former, not the latter. The beauty of this piece is that the author was open to the opportunity when it knocked and took a leap of faith. Having that ounce of courage was all the difference. Carpe diem.
3
Chance is not appreciated as much as it should be. If I had to choose, I'd rather celebrate the date my wife and I met than the date of our wedding. Thanks to Ms. Day and the Times for raising the subject.
3
Although I do not have a organized religious bone in my body I have always wondered is it truly random or ordained...
In my case I met my wife in the tourist information office in the train station in Nice France. She from NYC, me from San Francisco. We spent a few days there and then went to Paris together each of us for the first time. That was in the early 1980's.
My mother and father met when a ship, he was first mate on, got stuck in the USA in a lawsuit over the Tabaco load it had brought in. That was in late 1940 or early in 1941. He went with a cousin to Cleveland and met my mother. They married a year or two later.
A decade later or so over breakfast mom was reading the news about how it had snowed in Athens. The first time since the 1920's. My mom then went on about during a trip to Greece in the 1920's when she was a young girl; how her cousin's had never seen snow and how they went to Lykavittos Hill. she then talked about how she showed her cousin's how to ball up and toss a snowball. A Cleveland kid knows something about snow. She then talked about how they met some boys coming up the big steps on Lykavittos Hill and she tossed a snowball and hit one in the head. They all scattered and went on their way.
Apparently, my mother looked over the breakfast table at my father who was ashen white. She said he looked like he had seen a ghost. When she asked what was wrong, he said that he had been that boy!
Like I said, is it truly random or not?????
12
So clearly they were destined to be together. If at first it doesn’t succeed...
I met my wife in my living room at 2:30 a.m. My roommate was having an impromptu party while I was sleeping; I was awoken by the sounds of inebriated laughing. I woke up and stormed out, grumpy and indignant, prepared to tell them off. But the beautiful raven-haired girl sitting in my easy chair made me pause, and I opted for a dirty look at my roommate before going back to bed.
"Who was that girl?" I asked my roommate the next morning. He made a few calls and long story short, we met up with her a few nights later. We've been together nine years and have a rambunctuous five-year-old daughter.
Had I stayed in bed, they would be ghosts to me as well...and I also shiver when I think of the alternative.
7
I had to read this because the title spoke to me. I interpreted the title for a story about how us humans think of our past lives (who we were in our past life) but after i read the essay , this essay is just a already written, secret narrative , about an aspect, of my life. I am the only child. From my father's side , i have one sister who is alive. My stepmom had couple of miscarriages but one child prevailed a miscarriage , unfortunately only living to 9 days old. I think of my baby sister and how live would've been if she were alive. She would've currently been 12 years old. My alive sister is 15. I am 22 years old.
2
Thanks for a thoughtful piece that I believe resonates with just about everyone. But be careful: it could drive you crazy or make you unnecessarily sad to dwell on things that might have been. The effect on me is rather to revel in my good fortune, being fully conscious of how narrowly I escaped some life that would not be as good as the one I've had.
1
What a wonderful essay! I love thinking about parallel worlds, and I can't wait until the writer's novel IF, THEN is published!
Ms. Day’s piece beautifully captured those small moments where some unseen hand tips the scales -poignant and bittersweet.
My how “did you two meet” was random yet somehow meant to be. A dorm mate set two of us up to go motorcycling with two brothers on a Sunday afternoon but it never panned out. A year later, back at the dorm from the art department, my roommate was buzzed for a make caller. Instead of responding that she wasn’t there, I walked down to the lobby to say that she was still at class. The friend who had originally set up to go riding was there with one of the brothers and a another guy. They asked if I wanted to go riding. Rick showed up again the next day. We fell in love, married moved Hawaii where he grew up. We had two daughters. We were together for 18 years until he died of a brain tumor. I have so many “what ifs”. If we hadn’t met would I have moved back to NY after college? What would my life have been like without the culture of Hawaii, raising two part-Hawaiian daughters who danced hula and paddles outrigger canoes. So very foreign for a girl from LI.
Now living in Portland OR where my girls settled after college, I’m somewhat haunted by the ghost life. We would never have left Hawaii if Rick was still alive. I watch my still paired friends and wonder what would our retirement together be like? Im affled that this is how my “one glorious life” turned out.
6
Of course meeting your partner in the cross-street is a random major hinge event -- but deciding to marry her/him is a conscious big choice that is also a hinge event but not a random one. Its an important distinction.
1
As a newly-minted 73 year old, I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the role of happenstance in life. Of course there are obvious questions that accumulate at this point: what if I had not remarried my wife; what if I had remained in my professional field and not changed. There are obvious possibilities: I could have remained a carefree bachelor. I would have been happier professionally. But. The conclusion I came to is that one can simply not predict what would have happened if another fork in the road had been taken. I can not explain the calm that results from that realization.
6
Yes. I always think of this as the "road not taken". Had I done that instead of this, what would my life look like now and how would it be different? The older we get and the longer we live, it's more and more amazing to consider how had we not gone to that school or moved into that apartment or even some other small thing, just how different our life might have turned out down the road. And then as you note, there is the presence of our children, and the wonder of their specific existence as we not only had to meet their other parent but that exact sperm and egg had to come together. Life is pretty amazing, how ever you consider it.
6
My "hinge moment in life" is the day when I first saw my wife Ana. I was working at a hotel in downtown Phoenix since August of 2001. On December 11th of that year, I went down to the corner cafe to have lunch and then spotted a young lady with short dark hair dressed in a business suit having lunch with a group of older professionals. She reminded me of my favorite actress and model Isabella Rossellini and so I was smitten. So we exchanged business cards. I sent her an email in January Thus in late February to my delight I got an email from Ana asking me what I wanted from her. " I want to get to know you" I replied. From that beginning, we would email each other once every three weeks, then every two weeks, and then every week and finally just about every day as we calmly told each other about our lives and dreams and goals and found that we had a lot in common. We will celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary this coming October 18th and the adventures continue.
15
I believe what the author here was done, very well, is to answer the age old question - "what is time?" Time as measured by a clock is a human construct. What time really is is an endless and infinite series of overlapping possibilities we wander through for as long as our bodies and minds can do so. That's what I like to believe, anyway.
18
Yes, you are right Kate. For good or ill, this is our life. Based on things chosen or just luck.
I wish the remainder of your life and those that you love, to be joyful.
4
This is a lovely, well-written and poignant piece. It also enhances the current sense of loss I am experiencing from the strange disappearance of the man in my life.
We met and courted through the internet, eventually moving on to regular visits back and forth between here and his home in So. Florida. I found him to be the perfect companion for me and we were in love - at least I know I was - discussing the desire to spend our lives together. (After he "disappeared, in retrospect it is possible he lost that desire.)
Two years on, he had to go to Europe to attend to his mother in her final illness and was gone for 3 months. He never called during that absence, only sending occasional emails. When he returned, we made arrangements to spend 10 days of the coming holidays together to reconnect and strengthen our bond. At the last minute, he cancelled and had to dash back to Europe to attend to his sister who had a stroke.
Over the course of at least a year, he remained there to care for her and her many medical complications. Despite my pleas, he again refused to call and over time his written communications dwindled then stopped altogether. I can only speculate on the many possible reasons why, but I can't stop mourning the loss of that love and the life I could have had with him.
9
@RynWriter
Your report leaves me this thought only ... that the refrain, " 'tis better to have loved and lost [et cetera]" ... is most surely not 'owed' universal 'application.'
@RynWriter
Sorry for your pain. It’s real. But you’re better off without him.
5
@RynWriter Ugh, so sorry! He sounds like a typical online-dating scammer who probably has more than one girlfriend/wife or family; likely he never even went to Europe to attend to "family." )-:
This essay unfolds like an amazing piece of music. The way it narrows down to what seems like it will be a focus on the author's birth family, and children unborn or yet to be ... I was lulled into thinking this would be the point of the essay.
But then it hinged.
On my computer screen, I had to scroll past an ad to get to the paragraph that begins "But there’s another way of telling the story ...", and the following words shocked me out of my reading reverie. (Musically, what a moment this would be.)
And then the essay broadens out into territory that's always terrified me (when I think about it), the almost completely contingent nature of our lives.
I will be rereading this the way I listen repeatedly to great music.
Thank you, Kate Hope Day, for this.
PS - For a more laserlike approach to this subject matter, I've never forgotten an essay I read more than 30 years ago, "De Impossibilitate Vitae" by Stanislaw Lem. It examines how hinges proliferate, and how the one path that becomes reality is statistically impossible to occur. It's part of an ingenious collection called "A Perfect Vacuum".
But today let's keep the focus on Kate Hope Day. Thank you for this.
17
A phone call in 1968 changed the life of my entire family. An old boyfriend reached out from California to say hello. He invited me to visit him. Three weeks after returning from California I moved to the sunshine state. Both my sisters followed several years later. We all married, had families and eventually moved our mom to be close to us. If I had not been home for that call my life would have been different. I eventually moved to Texas, but that is a whole different story about a chance meeting.
7
What a beautiful and thought-provoking piece. It made me think about all the lives I almost lived...
18
Hinge moments are determined retrospectively. We want to make romanticized narratives of our lives. Every single moment of life is really a hinge moment.
39
F, you can only know a hinge moment _retrospectively._ That's the author's point.
"Every single moment of life is really a hinge moment."
No not at all. If you want to say that correctly it would need to say
"Every future moment of one's life is potentially a hinge moment."
Every past moment cannot be a hinge moment -- unless you want to talk about alternative universes and sci-fi stuff. It is reasonable to look to the past (which is now fixed) and then say which events were hinge.
2
This resonates deeply with me. My younger (and only sibling) sister died in a car crash the night before the celebration of my marriage. She was supposed to have dinner with us and out of town guests, but decided last minute to go out with friends to a bar. She died at 34. A lifetime now...she will be gone 25 years this December. We were extremely close. Should I have more forcefully demanded that she accompany us that night...I imagine celebrating all the milestones in life with her. I could have been an aunt and would have wildly loved her imaginary children.
28
@Donna L Rosenberg This made me cry.
2
My most impactful hinge moment happened in 8th grade; when I impulsively, with no clear thought of doing so, changed by mind about which high school I wanted to attend. That decision led to meeting my best friend and eventually marrying her brother. Moments. Mere moments that determine an entire lifetime.
26
I have been fascinated with these points in our lives and I've become convinced that they happen every day, all day. It's not just the large ones, like meeting a future spouse, but the smaller ones too. Steve Jobs famously said "you can only connect the dots looking backwards" (2005 Stanford Commencement address). There must be millions of alternative lives we could have lived if we had walked down another street, had a different conversation, stayed a little longer at the party, etc. A friend accompanied me on my walk across campus to the ROTC office in college when I was interested in joining - I ultimately didn't but he did and had a successful career in the Army. His son followed in his footsteps and was killed in Afghanistan - what if my friend had not walked with me that day in 1979. It continues to fascinate me.
31
I took a writing class in grad school where the TA talked about the importance of writing drafts. Your second draft may not look anything like your first, but you couldn’t create the second without writing the first. A good final product requires going through the process.
It also applies to life. You may go through things that are painful (death, divorce, moving, losing a job) but because of those experiences, you become a new, deeper draft of yourself that just may be where you need to be. There is no failure. There’s just moving toward an ever more complete, polished draft of you.
62
@Dr J I like your choices of words - "deeper" and "more complete," rather than "better." Your language is (appropriately) nuanced. Of course we like to think we get better but really we evolve, and in your words, become "more complete." We are complex beings. Everything we experience plays a part in the people we become.
2
How often I have thought of these hinge points, those points in our lives when all we can do is look out to sea and watch the ghost ships of our lives sailing into the mists of time. I could've decided to not have children and lived my life, fully and completely out; or I could've lived fully and died from AIDS as so many of my friends did, or ...
I have children, now grown with children of their own. Do I still sit by the ocean and wonder and wish? Do these points - the paths not taken - cause regret? I suppose they could if I dwelt on these things, but I believe the point of a fully lived life is to carry - happily carry - these ghost lives in a backpack in a deep recess of one's memory and not ask what could've been, but ask what will be.
22
@Peter Hornbein
Hi Peter. I never expected to meet you in the comments section. The last sentence of your comment is beautiful.
“What if?” Like a lot of ideas and objects in the material world, it can be dangerous if applied in the wrong way, liberating if used well. Generally, though, I try not to think about what might have been. All we have is today.
4
In my case there was a moment when my former girlfriend climbed the stairs of a duplex while I climbed the parallel ones at the same time to the apartment of my future wife. Too trite a scene for a movie, but there it was in my life-the fork in the road.
6
My story. My father had been training as a bombardier with the Royal Air Force in South Africa in 1943. On returning to England to go on active service in WW2 with Bomber Command, he spent a weekend with my mother [he hadn't seen her for 8 months]. He was killed in an air accident 14 October 1943 - and I was born 9 June 1944.
37
@Keith Johnson You were meant to be.
2
My parents met crossing a street. They just happened to be crossing from both sides at the same moment. They literally met in the middle of that street.
They died a few years ago, in their 90s, still married. Many years ago I took a trip with them, and got to see the exact spot on that street.
I met my wife at a dance. She had just started dancing, and I had been recovering from surgery, so thought I'd try out my foot. I walk in the door and see this woman out on the dance floor who sparkled with life. I asked her if I could have a dance. I was being socially appropriate--I could just have easily asked her, on the spot, if she would marry me.
Three months later she did marry me. And we spend every minute of every day with each other.
So much of life is due to chance. Good luck or bad luck. If we really could comprehend this I think we'd all go a little crazy because we have such a strong need to believe that we are in control of our lives.
This was really a nice article to read. Thank you.
75
Yes! Chance is beautiful. It’s what makes life fun. This human need to assign a “higher purpose” to everything drives me nuts. No, nobody is controlling it all, and that’s what makes it so special and unique.
2
I think this has something to do with why children seem slightly magical - they still have all potential outcomes within them, they haven’t yet taken one path and left the others behind.
58
I often think about a phone call my mum made to me when I was 18 asking if I wanted to go to Cancun with her (it was the late 80's) I was assisting a furniture photographer in Toronto when my pager went off and my mothers number appeared, I called her back and she put the offer to me. I love to travel so I quickly agreed. Not thinking about the fact I was going to a beach resort with my mum in my late teens. There I met a girl from NY. We dated for three years in a long distance kind of way. Before cell phones and cheap phone plans. Never mind texting and Facetime. Eventually she broke my heart and it was that moment when I decided to do a road trip across the US by myself that we had talked about doing together. I eventually made my way to LA where I started to work as an assistant photographer and eventually a photographer on my own. I've shot album covers that have sold over 15 million copies, celebrities and ad campaigns. Eventually I moved to NY and began shooting for NGO's and the UN. Now, I don't know what I would have been had I stayed in Toronto but I know for a fact I would not be the photographer I am. I can trace it all back to a phone call from my mum. There is no other obvious "hinge" in my life that has had such a profound effect on my life as that call.
32
About 10 years ago I saw a Broadway musical starring Idina Menzel that was about just this thing. Although I found the show interesting I remember having a lot of anxiety after it ended. For me it’s best to focus on what is rather than what could have been. Otherwise I would lose my mind!
23
Starfish and coffee
1
This essay was so beautiful. I think about this all the time, and I'm so grateful that Kate Hope Day was able to articulate it in these gorgeous words and images.
15
Awesome way to start the week.
I too met my wife by chance - I was a teacher and a snowstorm caused a delayed opening, giving us a chance to meet in a parking lot. She had a live-in boyfriend but I quietly stayed in the background.
Four years later, we had our first date. That was five years ago this July. We now have two boys and, right about the time we will be celebrating our 5th first-date anniversary, we will also be welcoming our baby girl into the world.
Life is crazy, tragic and wonderful. I often have to remind myself that I “did it” - that I held out and found the woman who is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.
She is my North Star. I hope she always is.
48
Oh, this is lovely. Thank you.
11
The author cannot know whether the road not taken may have had a better outcome, or one that was largely identical, or worse. One never knows, but if you look at the arc of history you see that the general flow presses on to outcomes that were seemingly predetermined. Truly random things are rare.
10
D, be careful believing everything is predetermined! Are you sure you want to believe that everything is written in stone before you were even born?
2
Others have traversed this ground, to be sure, but oh, not as beautifully as you have, Ms. Day.
Thank you for such an evocative essay. I won't soon forget it.
22
"A path diverged in a yellow wood"
22
Such a beautiful essay—it brought tears to my eyes. It's impossible not to think about the little hinge points in life, when a series of seeming coincidences led to something life-changing. It's especially fascinating when quantum physicists really do believe there are infinite alternate realities, with different us-es who made different decisions. Such lovely food for thought (and a reminder to be grateful for the good in our own personal timelines).
21
@Andi Wouldn't it be fun to have coffee with 5 of our different us-es to see how life turned out when those hinge moments went a different way? What would they consider their hinge moments? ("I decided to go to the Parthenon despite my headache and met this incredible man and our second daughter eventually saved the world")
3
Wow, what a great essay. I think about these things a lot too. Can't wait for the book to come out!
10
This a lovely essay. I imagine we all have these kinds of stories.
My short version: 40 years ago today I met my life partner. We now have a daughter and granddaughter. Lots to celebrate when chance encounters last. (Lots of hard work, patience and deep deep love)
8
Oh, how I can relate to this.
On a hot summer day in 1996 I walked into a bedding store to buy a few things for my new apartment. Before I left I would meet the woman I would eventually marry and have children with. We are together almost 23 years.
Had I hit one more red light on the drive to the store that day, our family would not exist.
Had I not approached her to say hello...
Had I walked in a different direction once inside the store...
Had she left her own home to go shopping 10 minutes earlier...or later...
Any number of occurrences could have deterred our eventual meeting. But any number of occurrences took place to ensure that it did indeed happen.
Not a day in my life goes by when I do not think about this...
46
Thoughtful piece, but I think the analogy of the husband is mistaken.
The author had no control over the early death of her sibling. And this understandably created not just sadness, but anxiety at the realization of how little control we have over our lives.
Now she is faced with a major decision (whether to have a 3rd child). And this creates anxiety for a different reason: she has control over this, and the decision could go wonderfully right or terribly wrong, whichever way she decides. That's a legitimate concern.
But, in a piece that is otherwise sober and thought-provoking, the story of how she met her husband isn't the right analogy.
If she didn't have her headache, she wouldn't have met her current husband and borne these two kids. True. But, 36 h or 3 years later, she likely would have met someone else and married and had kids -- not because these are guaranteed, but because many other factors were already in place. She had the resources and health and time to backpack through Europe at a young age and stay in dorm-style lodging, grew up with loving parents and siblings, received education, etc...
I share some experiences of the author. If she thinks the way in which she met her husband is in the same universe of events of how she lost her brother, I think there is a loss of proportion, and she will be unnecessarily overwhelmed by anxiety by many things through life.
27
"But, 36 h or 3 years later, she likely would have met someone else and married and had kids"
That's kinda not the point though. That "other" marriage partner you refer to could have been a nightmare/disaster relationship. A marriage to someone else is not automatically equivalent to the marriage she actually has. That's an odd idea.
You emphasize the idea of control in your comment but the author makes a point of saying that she had no control over her sick day or the death of a sibling. Control is not really the point. I think we all like to believe we have control over things and we do sometimes -- but most of the time we can only make best guesses and try to move forward. Anxiety is more likely to arrive if one tries to exert control and the universe smiles back at you bemused that you would try such a thing :)
2
Amazing insights— awareness of the consequences of the lives we choose and the choices that are made for us.
When our children were young, we lived in a perfect neighborhood, in a perfect town. Our quiet, mid-60’s era neighborhood had houses full of young kids, sidewalks and skating rinks, elementary school at the end of the street, sledding hills and bike paths, churchs, colleges, soccer and baseball teams, YMCA’s, parks, nature centers, hiking trails, lakes, community festivals.... and a neighborhood full of kids. Playmates, babysitters— all ages.
Of course, some people moved in and out— and one day, a promotion arrived for my husband and it was our turn. I hated to go— and I have missed it and regretted it ever since. It’s our “Ghost Life”— my boys growing up among the friends they had known since babyhood. They were 6 & 3 —just when they were getting old enough to play outside alone, to run from house to house, to ride bikes and have adventures together.
In my “Ghost Life”, we live there still. Ben and Sammie are just down the street, Shea, Zack, Alison, Jarrod, Nathan,Hannah, Sophia, Joey, and all their brothers and sisters are all there too— and they have all grown up together, trick-or-treating, caroling at Christmas, walking to school together, playing sports, playing in band, scouts, homecomings and proms, graduations.
Our real life has, of course, been rich & fun— but out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes see the other, “Ghost Life “ too....
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This very topic has been much on my mind lately. A recent trip to Mexico City with a girlfriend brought us to the Museum of Anthropology - a museum worth the price of a plane ticket by itself. Wandering rapt among the Olmecs, I suddenly remembered taking a pre-Columbian art history class once, in my '20s, A year or two into my first job as a newspaper writer. I remember being so excited by this world I asked the professor for his recommendations on the best graduate schools (this was well before the internets made such sleuthing easy). I went so far as to correspond with a dept. chair at one of them...but I was young, and living with my boyfriend...and I had lucked into a real newspaper job, not something to throw away lightly...I ultimately opted to not pursue this avenue further. Fast forward more than 35 years, to my first trip ever to CDMX. I realized I might be at home here, fluent in Spanish and several indigenous languages. I might well be the guest of one of the curators, who would be a professional colleague. They might know me as La Professora. How different my life would have been had I pursued that avenue. Now in my '50s, the mother of 20-somethings myself (things turned out), I now understand the compound interest of years, and the bittersweet pause of the road not chosen. Thank you for writing this!
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@badhomecook Yes! And the “compound interest of years” is a marvelous way to express the experience.
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A beautiful read that brings the reader along with pleasure in the what is and the what if’s. A pleasure to read. Excited to read her novel.
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The entire course of my life was changed when I was a 21-year-old college student. The usual classroom for one of my classes was being painted, so we were relocated to a room on a different floor of the building. It was on a bulletin board on that unfamiliar floor that I saw the announcement of an academic program In one of my areas of interest.
I applied, was accepted, and completed the program, leading to further study and two different careers.
Seeing that bulletin board literally determined my future.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had gone ahead with my original plans to become a high school teacher.
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@Pdxtran I had a similar situation. I was finishing up with college, preparing to graduate with a liberal arts degree. I was wondering what I could with such a degree when I happened to walk by a bulletin board advertising the date to sit for the LSAT. Thought, why not? The rest, as they say, is history.
Lovely writing. I’m reminded of the older movie “Sliding Doors”.
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@LC Yes! That is one of the movies I always stop and watch if it is on TV. The protagonist gets to live both her real life and "ghost life." Interesting to see the divergence.
There are days in which I start wondering how life would have been if x or y had gone a different way. Then I remember that those precise steps, the bad and good, led me to my husband, and I am incredibly grateful for each one of them.
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