June, 1954. Just graduated from HS. Was admitted to several colleges, but no scholarship. The era of need-based scholarship didn’t exist and my HS record and college boards were very good but not excellent (B+ average, 31st out of 255 in my class about 1300 college boards). I didn’t know what I was going to do. My best thought was to get a summer job and save enough to pay for one year at Drexel which had a co-op program that you could earn enough to pay for the rest. So I was scanning the Help Wanted ads in the paper and there was one for a lab tech. So I called and made an appointment for an interview. When I got to the place, which was the biophysics department at Penn, they told me that this was not a summer job, but a whole program in which you would work full-time and be a part-time student, but be able to graduate in five years by taking 9 credits each term and 3 credits each of the two summer terms, making 120 credits after 5 years. I jumped at the chance and my life changed!
A couple years later, I was working one evening (to make up for a course I was taking in the daytime) and came on two graduate students discussing what turned out to be a course in modern algebra that one of them was taking and the other one had already taken. It sounded both strange and interesting, so interesting that I decided on the spot to take the course the following year. Again my life changed. I have been doing research in modern algebra all the rest of my life.
Several years later, I was already a PhD and teaching at Columbia when my mother was sitting around at a swimming pool with a friend who suddenly said something like, “My cousin M.”. Duly I took M. out for a date. My ife changed again. We were married 6 months later and still are, over 50 years later.
At least three butterflies in my life. Probably more.
I got laid off from a job that I was bored with. I’d planned to look for another job after the new year.
Two weeks after the layoff, I found an ad for the kind of job I really wanted, working for a software company where I could use the healthcare industry knowledge I’d been amassing for decades. I interviewed and was hired in February. I do a lot of research and have minimal face-to-face client interaction.
Sitting in Foreign Service orientation class with a bunch of other bored people. They do a lot of different segments such as taking the MLAT (language aptitude), security, etc. But on this day it was some sort of sensitivity thing. Some woman was blathering on about how we’re all unique snowflakes in our own far out and happening way, and I had pretty much tuned her out. Then she decided to do a participation exercise; just the sort of thing I abhor.
She started by asking who was from the East Coast, then from the South, working her way across the country to the West Coast, and I figured it would end there. To my surprise she then asked if anybody was from Alaska or Hawaii. I looked around and saw no hands, so I blurted out “I guess that would be me. I’m from Alaska.”
A woman a few rows up from me turned and gave me a speculative look, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, assuming she was looking to see what sort of oddity someplace like Alaska would produce. Turns out she had been there and hiked the Chilkoot Pass, a feat not many can brag about, and she loved the place. She immediately asked the guy sitting next to her if he knew who I was.
Within a year I had divorced my wife of over 20 years, and who I was dreading spending the rest of my life with, and had married this remarkable woman. That was 22 years ago. If I hadn’t roused myself from what was nearly a comatose state of boredom to answer that one question, life may have taken an entirely different direction.
All this talk of unlikely bringing together of couples has convinced me that my butterflies are either asleep on the job or are actively malevolent. I suppose it’s equally possible that a butterfly could flap its wing and the love of your life would walk past and forever away while you’re messing around with a broken shoe lace. But how would you know?
Life is a series of random acts and the universe is chaos. There is no predestination, no ‘book of you’ already written. Things that seem coincidental are just that.
Probably my biggest is from when I was in New Zealand; a country I’d always wanted to visit. I’d been travelling a pretty standard route around, but when sitting in a backpackers’, flicking through a guide for the hostels in the town I was heading to next, saw what looked like a really interesting advert for a place in the direction I’d just come from.
It was my birthday the next day, and I wanted to go somewhere nice, so I went, just out of curiosity, for a day. I wound up staying 3 months. The manager was a hobby fire performer, something I’d actually had a bit of a phobia about since watching fire breathing go wrong as a kid, and thought if I learned how to do some of it myself, I’d probably lose the panic. The manager and his girlfriend taught me some stuff.
By the time I left, I had a new hobby- one that would affect everything from the city I moved to when I got back to England, to who my friends are, to where I’ve been. I’ve performed publically in fire shows, and 10 years later, I still go to at least one circus or juggling club a week.
I attended the baptism of my cousin Charlie’s daughter and was seated across from a beautiful girl who had just lost over one hundred pounds after gastric bypass surgery. She looked at me in my 380 pound glory and said, " go get gastric bypass surgery. You’ll die if you don’t." Never saw the girl again. The next day I called Columbia hospital and made arrangements to attend a seminar on bariatric surgery . One year later,I had lost two hundred pounds and was living an awesome healthy life. And continue to do so today. Really, nothing that’s happened in the last thirteen years would have been possible had I not met that woman.
“If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college”…
Seriously though, my life would probably be completely different if Fabio hadn’t been hit in the face with a duck.
I was sitting in Pizza Hut one Saturday afternoon when I guy I knew from high school came in. He stopped to chat, and ended up asking if I’d like to go to church with him that evening. I said yes, and that led to my moving from IL to IA, meeting my ex-wife, enlisting in the Navy, meeting my current wife (married for 21 years now), and settling in CT (where my last duty station was).