Today I came within a razor’s breath of having a collision with another vehicle on the road. I was at a stop sign waiting to turn right. Yes, there was some waiting involved—you know, how wrong is it that the traffic coming from the right clears only in time for a bunch of cars to show up from the left? And you have to, you know, wait for god’s sake, for both sides to clear. It’s clearly an imposition on the way things should be. It did finally clear on the right and I was certain that just the instant before there had been no traffic from the left, so I began to pull into my turn. But just as I did so a car sped by from that direction—I would say well over the speed limit—one that must have come into range in that fractional instant I had chosen to glance at the smart phone in my lap for that text or email you sent me and which you know you would not want me to delay in seeing. It was a very close call and I think it would have been rather worse for him—the other guy—as he would have hurtled into the collision front-end first, at high speed and very possibly without a seatbelt.
A couple of weeks ago a man whom I never knew, but who was well known in his west side Cleveland neighborhood as the proprietor of one of Cleveland’s happiest casual venues, died young and suddenly, after a tumble down a flight of steps. That’s it—he fell down a flight of steps, a stairwell at the tavern he co-owned, so one that he must have climbed up and down a thousand times. Maybe the steps were wet that night. Maybe he’d had a drink or two. Maybe, for god’s sake, a shoelace was loose.(And actually someone I knew, and who knew the venue, told me those steps were treacherous.) Any way, he fell and must have fallen hard, and fallen in just such a way that his brain needed to darken the lights, permanently.
And last month, very early in the morning, a terrible fire broke out in the house where I lived. It was confined to the unit above me, where my landlady lived, but this was not a small kitchen fire gone a little out of control. The unit upstairs was largely destroyed, and I saw my landlady, whom I know and like as someone fair and friendly, carried out by firemen into the sub-zero night, unconscious and barely breathing. She survived, owing to the firemen and the EMS and the doctors and nurses at the burn unit where she was taken (in fact, she wasn’t burned, but suffered extensive smoke inhalation). But this could not have been confidently predicted when I saw her carried out in the frigid night, as my dog and I, bewildered, loitered amidst the fire trucks and cop cars and cops assembled in the street.
Though I would have to move abruptly, I do not feel in any way “traumatized” by this event, or aggrieved. (I was terrified, yes, at being woken by fire fighters pounding on my doors, storming the building, busting open locks in the house with a thunderous crash; and I was mortified at the sight of my landlady being carried out, something I will not quite forget.). The “event” itself was over rather quickly, owing again to the great skill and courage of the firefighters on the scene. And the truth is that while it was happening I never felt myself to be in personal danger.
However, I know that this could have changed quickly, and might have been—with the altering of a detail or two—a very different story. (It was the couple next door, unable to sleep, who saw the smoke coming from the second story windows and called 911.) And I have carried away from the episode a sense of something profound having passed my way—a sense of how quickly your life can change, of the hairpin turns it can take while you are, literally, asleep. And of the randomness of events. Awareness of randomness, of the absence of order in the universe, of a rational scheme to things, feels like an encompassing theme of middle age—or my middle age, at any rate. Who can fathom the meaning, an “intelligent design” behind a random tumble down a flight of stairs, the near miss at the traffic intersection, a sleepless couple who saved a life (and maybe mine) with a phone call?
In a whimsical, wise and unpretentious book written as a series of alphabetized observations, Laurie Kraus-Rosenthal, in “The Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life,” remarks on the ordinariness of random deaths.
There are so many ways to die at any given moment. Just look, look at all those ambulances in your rearview mirror. There are crashes and wrecks and collisions galore: cars, planes, Amtraks, ferries. You could have a heart attack; it’s not unlikely. A terminal illness you didn’t even know you had could, minutes from now, live up to its defining adjective. Now turn your attention to all the freak accidents lurking in the wings. A massive store display tips over (happened). A soccer goal post unroots itself and crushes a skull (happened). Shelving holding five thousand pounds of sheet metal or lumber at Home Depot collapses (imagined). A top bunk falls onto the bottom bunk (imagined). A strong wind unhinges scaffolding and blows it directly onto a sports car; inside are—were—two twenty-year-olds out shopping (happened). Aneurisms that burst midsentence, ending the life of an advertising executive, a promising playwright, a children's book author (happened, happened, and happened)…. People are just dying everywhere, all the time, every which way. What can the rest of us do but hold on for dear life.
Indeed. Is there anything more ordinary than dying, even when it happens in ways we think are startling or extraordinary? Is it possible that the really extraordinary thing is that we survive so many moments, one after the other? And then there is this scarily reproachful poem entitled “New Year’s Eve,” by Carl Dennis:
However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor’s party to her parents’ farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.
One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at a body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.
If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with your character,
Don’t blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.
Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.
Lucky you, lucky me. The providence of luck, of the random, as I’ve grown aware of it has upended the shallower faith of my youth in the providence of a God who would favor me always because of my character—did you know that I’m a pretty good guy with pretty good intentions?—the faith that my good character would be a guarantor of success, an assurance that doors would open for me and lights would turn green. Never mind that, in fact, I have had a fairly blessed passage; I’ve seen enough to know it’s been a crap shoot.
A friend and an Episcopalian priest (who also by the way lived through a house fire when he was a teenager) advised me that he had long ago given up trying to “figure out” how God doles out good and bad fortune. Or why, by our lights, he does such a bad job of it. And it occurred to me later: what kind of allegiance—other than a wary, competitive, adversarial one—could such a god of obscure stratagems summon, even once you had “figured out” the strategy?
Maybe randomness itself is a gift. Because really, how much would we want a god who so intruded upon the course of things that our lives were fixed, as if we were playing craps at a table rigged in our favor to win, forever? Although it seems on the surface to be desirable, I wonder if in fact it wouldn’t come to seem oppressive and intolerable—as intolerable, come to think of it, as a life without death, without dying, in which you wake forever to days, one after the other, drained of salience and urgency. I can’t believe any longer in a God who fixes things if we say the right prayers, go to the right building on Sunday (or Saturday or Friday), but I can believe in one who suffers alongside of us in the randomness of his own creation —Emmanuelle, God-With-Us—a god who might thereby summon in return compassion, solidarity, fellow-feeling, the willingness to suffer with others.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, for a couple of weeks, I went about with a little buzz on, a heightened vigilance, and a keen desire to be careful—not just of dangerous things, but of people and their feelings. An instinct to be more mindful, more present. Well…..you can see how long it lasted before it gave way, at a busy intersection, to the siren call of that important text you sent me. Still, I would like to think that this instinct will stay with me, will return to me for practice from time to time.
Great poets may have a more lasting, penetrating and ecstatic sense of it, of the abyss above which we dangle by a thread. And the really enlightened—Jesus, the Bodhisattvas—may couple it with an intuition that what we call the abyss is just a velvet crease in the cupped hand of the universe, of Being itself. Being falling into Being.
Something like that. Meanwhile, the rest of us, sculling for clams in the shallow water, can hope to be a little more awake to each other every now and again, and should make do with some practical lessons--keep a working smoke alarm in your home, buy renters insurance, wear seatbelts and drive the speed limit, and put the goddamn phone away in the glove compartment when you’re driving.
Lucky you, lucky me, that we really do (as I think John Updike pointed out) survive every single moment, except for the very last one.
