Why was it “purest chance”? You had taken the initiative of applying to law school. You were good enough that they accepted you and offered youi money. If you hadn’t answered the phone, they would have called later, or sent you a letter by registered mail, to the address you listed on your application.
Do you think that after one unanswered phone call they would have just thrown your application in the trash? (That might even be illegal, anyway…if they have affirmative action policies, etc, and objective criteria for accepting students)
I didn’t live in the house anymore so there was only a 15 minute window in which I was there to answer the phone. They could not have called at any other time and reached me. The phone service should have been turned off June 1, for whatever reason it wasn’t. They didn’t have any other phone number and I didn’t have a forwarding address, I was just crashing with friends for a few weeks. A registered letter could not have been delivered, as the cottage was standing empty.
I was 22 and had just got over a week-long stomach flu. Not being able to keep anything down except water, ginger ale and saltines had completely detoxed me. I went back to work feeling like a million bucks and got a bag of candy - Swedish Berries, exactly. Popped one into my mouth and BAM instant headache. I stood there at the counter of my work staring at this bag of Swedish Berries and everything fell into place. I don’t gain weight so for my entire life I ate junk food and was a complete couch potato. I never exercised or looked after myself. That one little Swedish Berry made me realize why I was tired, weak and sick all the time. Why I constantly felt awful. Until that moment I had absolutely no concept of how food affected my body. I threw out the candy and began eating healthy, working out and taking care of my health.
Birth of my first child is obvious. I can think of two others.
I was a junior in high school. I was active in my church youth group and had sent away for information (pre-internet days!) from various small Christian colleges. One of them was Northwestern College in Iowa. A few weeks later I got an invitation in the mail to attend a prospective student presentation in nearby Boston for Northwestern University. Growing up in the Northeast I had never heard of Northwestern U. and I mistakenly thought is was the small Christian school I had send a postcard to, but was not really interested in. But I went with my parents anyway. Needless to say I quickly figured out that this was not the same school at all, but I became enamored with NU at that presentation and ended up attending there which completely altered the course of my adult life.
The second event was when I was about 29 years old, still single and living in Chicago. I was giving a ride to the wife of a friend of mine, and she was trying to set me up with my friend’s cousin who lived in Nashville. My friend was kind of dorky, so I assumed his cousin would be also. Besides, she was single in her late 20’s and a schoolteacher and lived with her sister. Obviously something was wrong with her, not to mention she lived 500 miles away. So I kept telling my friend that I wasn’t interested. Finally she said to me “Skammer. I promise you… if you just EMAIL her, you guys will get married!”
The idea was so preposterous that I laughed and the next day I emailed this girl in Nashville out of the blue, just so I could tease my friend about it the rest of her life.
Ten months later I was married to the cousin; we celebrated our 13th anniversary last fall.
While attending college my Sociology teacher encouraged me to apply for an internship at human resources for the city of Eugene. That internship lead to a position working for our public library. My life changed drastically after landing here. All in good ways. Thank you, Maestro Sámano!
The first is when my grandfather died when I was twelve. At that point, mine was a pretty typical life, although my mother was mentally (and sometimes physically) abusive. However, after he passed away, mom went full-tilt boogie off the fundamentalist religion deep end and literally everything changed. She was vastly over protective before, but afterwards, in addition to everything sending me to hell, she was downright crazy. Our location changed to reflect that. Her parenting style upped the ante by about a million degrees. All sorts of things, some okay, others decidedly not.
The second is when they discovered my husband had non-alcoholic cirrhosis. The offshoot of that has been him losing his health and me becoming his only caretaker, we’ve lost our home and everything such a catastrophic situation would entail. Just how it taxes you daily is beyond anything I’ve ever dealt with personally. It’s so incredibly fricking hard.
I thought about adding my first nervous breakdown, but I’ve come so far past that and have, literally, kicked mental illnesses’ ass, that at this point, all I can say about that is, “Bitch, that’s all you got?” So, meh.
A single moment in time directly led to my meeting Suburban Plankton and spending the last 23+ years with him.
October 1990: I was in college and I had a first date with a guy who lived near campus. I commuted to school about 40 minutes each way. Instead of going home and coming back, I went to hang out with one of my best friends, Mark, who lived near campus until it was time to meet my date. Mark and I had been best friends for a number of years. Most of that time one or both of us were dating other people, as we were when we met. At that moment we were both single.
So I’m at his apartment, and we’re hanging out like normal. Then I go to get ready for my date. I am literally about to walk out his door and he asks me not to go. I looked at him and realized just how much I wanted to stay. This was in the days before cell phones and I was meeting my date somewhere and there really was no options to just not show up. He was a nice guy and part of my ball room dance group. So just standing him up would have been awful and wrong. I told Mark I was conflicted, but I just couldn’t be a jerk to this guy. I went on my date. I ended up dating this guy a couple months. It was not a serious relationship. Two months later (12/8/90), we went with a group of his friends to an event and at that event I met my future husband.
I simply cannot tell you the number of times I have wondered how my life would have been different if I had stood up that guy and stayed with Mark that night.
In the months after I came home from the Navy my dad gave me a gentle order to be out of the house by a certain date. Thus began several weeks of apartment hunting.
One afternoon when I was on my way home from work I randomly stopped by a convenience store and picked up a copy of the Princeton Packet to look in the classified section. There was a room for rent nearby. I called the number that was listed and eventually went to the house and met the owner and his wife.
They liked me, so I moved in at the end of the month.
As it turned out, they were getting divorced and the woman had brought her sister up from Brazil for emotional support during that challenging part of her life. The sister stayed at the house while she was working in the city.
Had I not picked up the paper that day I would have never met my wife. We have been married for 23 years.
This reminds me of my wife’s and my one foray into matchmaking. As we got to know my new housemate one year in grad school, my wife and I thought that he and my wife’s best friend from high school would just be perfect together.
Actually, my wife was still my fiancee at the time, and we were getting married in May, at the end of that academic year. We made sure they met just before our wedding, they hit it off right away, and have now been married over 20 years.
When I was 17 and driving my first car, me and a girl were going for a drive. I looked up from a map in the split-second before we would have crashed into the back of another car that was taking a turn. I managed to swerve around the car. The girl didn’t have her seat belt on either, and we were going highway speed.
When working with an audio engineer, we had tape recorders with a little spring-loaded door that needed to be opened to thread the tape over the recording heads, and to close to hold the tape firmly aligned. I flipped the door shot, snapping it in place. The chief said not to do that, and I replied “that’s what the spring is for”. He said no it isn’t, its to hold it shut once it is shut, but snapping it shut can knock the delicate heads out of place, requiring maintenance. Which he didn’t want to any more often than he had to.
From that moment on (50 years now – yes, that was in 1963), I have never slammed a door, or let the spring close it uncontrolled. Nor anything else, I never let anything just fall into place, I set it down with hand control, gently and quietly. When operating the bathroom sink stopper, I don’t just slam it down, I take hold of the knob and push it down until is seats. With a few fun exceptions, like when I’m dealing cards, I frisbee them across the table to my opponent. I’m not totally obsessive.
Oh, I thought of another one. When I was a kid, I read in a sport magazine that Richie Ashburn and Eddie Yost were the only major league ballpayers who did not smoke or drink. I resolved at that moment that when I became a big league ballplayer, a magazine would report that I did not smoke or drink. I still don’t, even though I never made it to the big leagues. Thank you, Richie and Eddie, you saved my life.
Walking into my undergrad uni for the first time to sign up as an older student, the adviser who latched onto me just happened to be an Anthropology prof. I ended up taking Anthropology in my first semester and became very involved in it in such a way that my life took a certain course.
There was this one phone call I made in Hawaii that went unanswered. If it had been answered, my life would probably have taken a very different course than it has since then. But after I hung up after letting it ring awhile, events transpired that made trying the phone call again unnecessary.