AS I PLEASE XX: HAPPY ACCIDENT EDITION

Yesterday I woke up feeling a little gloomy, because it was Sunday, and I have a lot of adult tasks to take on before, and after, I do anything enjoyable. I need to run errands. I need to do laundry and dishes. I need to pay, retroactively, for my recent trip to Miami. I need to have someone look at my alternator. None of that sounds the least bit fun. When I hit the street to get coffee, however, I noticed an unusually lively crowd upon the street, and soon realized it wasn't Sunday at all, but Saturday. The calendar in my head, never very reliable, was more confused than usual. This got me thinking about Bob Ross, and his signature remark, "We don't make mistakes in painting -- we have happy accidents."

In life, as opposed to painting, we do make mistakes which have no upside, no happiness attached to them. I have made more than my share -- quite a bit more than my share, actually. Yet the idea of the happy accident persists. The wrong turn that leads us in the right direction, the missed opportunity that leads us to a better one, the mislaid object that turns up years later at the exact moment it is most useful, are all experiences we have on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes the entire course of a life can be dictated by them. How many successful marriages, careers, and life choices are the result of a combination of careless mistakes and random chance coming together in a moment of incandescent good fortune? What follows is a short, random list of some of the happy accidents which have occurred to me, or others, and the effects the accident had upon the life in question. Some are trivial in the extreme, others incredibly profound. If one does not believe in Fate, then both call into question the role that random chance plays in our lives, the mockery it makes of all our plans and grand ambitions.

* Way back in 2002, I had a job interview scheduled for the early morning. The interview was in Maryland, and I still lived in Pennsylvania at the time, so I spent the night before at my mom's house. As I dressed, however, I realized I had forgotten my shoes. I could hardly go to the interview in a new suit and old sneakers, so I called my would-be employer, told a stupid lie about my car, and asked to reschedule for the afternoon. I then went on a farsical quest for dress shoes, only to discover absolutely nothing was open. I ended up paying $100 -- in 2023 prices, $160 -- at Banana Republic for a pair of very uncomfortable leather shoes which I seldom wore again, though they still darken my closet to this day. When at last I set out for my interview, I couldn't take my supposedly broken down car, so I hopped the Metro, which had a stop only blocks from the place I was going. Unfortunately for me, I still couldn't find it, and wandered about in ferocious late-summer heat as the time dwindled and sweat wilted my collar. At last, by sheer chance, I blundered into the business at the very stroke of the appointment time. I was flushed, out of breath, and uncomfortable (the shoes pinched). A secretary handed me a sheet of paper with questions I was going to be asked during the interview, and I left sweat-fingerprints on it. I both looked at felt like a disaster. I decided, right then and there, to chalk it all up as a loss. I went into the interview already having given up, and made no attempt to be impressive. I make jokes about my appearance. My to the answers to the questions were flip. I gave every impression of not giving a damn about whether I got the job or not, and walked out laughing at how badly the entire day had gone from the very beginning. You know what's coming, of course: I got the job. And I not only got the job, I got the $10,000 increase in salary from my previous job I had blithely demanded, which necessitated getting a promotion before I had even been hired. I had beaten out better qualified candidates on the strength of my utter indifference, which itself was the result of a series of stupidities on my part.

* In 1936, George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side. The Loyalists were a conglomeration of center and left parties which had remained loyal (hence the name) to the Spanish government and were fighting the Fascist-backed revolt of General Franco. These parties, which included socialists, communists, anarchists and constitutionalists of the more traditional democratic type, did not get along. Orwell had originally joined a Marxist militia called the Party of Marxist Unification, which refused to take its orders from Moscow (meaning Stalin) and was therefore unpopular with orthodox Communists. Orwell, whose political opinions were still forming at the time, was never content in this militia and wanted to fight for a purely Communist brigade, mainly because it saw more action at the front than his own outfit, the 29th. However, the day he was supposed to "see a man" about a transfer while on leave in Madrid, he found himself with indigestion from a too-heavy meal, and missed the appointment. Thus, he was still a member of the 29th Division when the Loyalist government suppressed the Party of Marxist Unification via a series of mass arrests. Orwell barely managed to escape Spain with his life, but before he did he saw firsthand his own group unfairly villified in the press and its members condemened to prisons without trial and in many cases, shot. The atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and betrayal haunted him for the rest of his life; so too did his understanding that the press, and history, could be altered to serve the whims of the ruling party. These fears proved the basis not only of his world view and politics generally, but led to "1984," which he wrote years later and changed the world forever. Had he transferred to the communist side, he admitted he would have been spared the purges and probably believed the official "line" that the Party of Marxist Unification had betrayed the government. The course of literary history was changed because he ate too much at lunch.

* When I was in college, I desperately wanted to join a certain fraternity. It was the only one on campus that I saw myself comfortably a part of, because it had no typical member. It was comprised of jocks, drunks, drug-users, artists, brawlers, brains, playboys and nerds. It is typical of my brain, however, that the more important something is to me, the more liklely I am to forget to do it, and on the night I was supposed to meet the brothers for an initial interview, I went to a house party and got drunk off my ass. By sheer chance I encountered another youngster on their way to an interview of their own, and tore an unteady path to the Student Union, arriving just in the nick of time. I am not the sort of drunk who shows their drunkenness: I don't slur words, stumble, or become belligerent or silly. I do, however, become more relaxed and confident, with all my social anxiety nicely boiled. The combination of having no time to worry about the interview and being accidentally plastered made me the perfect interviewee: the guy doing the questioning remarked, "You're hell in an interview, man!" I got a bid, pledged, was initiated, and thirty years later still count among the members of that fraternity many of my closest friends. All because I forgot I had the appointment and got lit up on warm, flat, cheap brew.

* In 1969, my friend William returned to New York City from a tour in Vietnam bearing deep physical and emotional scars. He was embittered by his experiences and by the difficulties he was having readjusting to civilian life -- unfortunately a very typical problem both for Nam vets and war veterans in general. One night, feeling footloose, he was on his way to a card game in Brooklyn when he passed a long line of young men waiting for entrance to a building. He asked one of them what they were waiting for. "A police entrance exam," came the reply. "To hell with it," he said, and joined the line, foregoing his card game. He took the test, passed, and was offered a spot in the next academy class. Twenty years later he retired a detective lieutenant, and went on to become a very successful private investigator, fiction and non-fiction author, and a Ph.D in Criminal Justice. All because he chose taking an exam over a seat at a poker table.

* In 2005, I met a beautiful girl for whom I fell head over heels. We dated briefly, and seemed to have the right chemistry for a serious relationship, but she was leaving to study abroad and I thought that was the end of it. Several years later I was in a now-extinct bar and ducked my head briefly into the poolroom. I don't know why: I wasn't looking for anyone, nor did I have an especial desire to play pool. I just walked in and walked out, then resumed my seat at the bar with my friends. A few moments later The Girl in Question appeared. She said she'd been shooting a game with friends of her own, saw me walk in, and followed me to my stool. She was single. I was single. We became a couple, and a few months later we moved to Los Angeles together. I had been fat (so speak) fat and happy where I was in life: I had a terrific apartment, a comfortable life, a wide circle of friends. My only real issue was a nagging feeling that I could do a lot more with my life, and that time was running out for me to do it. She proved the catalyst to up-end that particular hourglass and start life over anew, in a different place, where the risks and the stakes were both considerably higher. I spent the next twelve and a half years in L.A. All because of a random impulse to see what was going on next door.

* Speaking of L.A., and to wind up this Sunday entry of As I Please, here is a story I may have told before, but, well, never get tired of telling, because it seems to walk a fractured line between serendipity, luck, destiny and fate. Twenty-three years ago, I was at one of those periodic low points which help describe the arc of our lives on this planet. I was recently and unhappily single, bored and frustrated with my job, and struggling badly with my finances. I lived in a rather barren neighborhood, had serious issues with my car and therefore my social life, and my weekends were dismal: oftimes I wouldn't say a word to another human being between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. My sole interaction was a Sunday visit to the McDonald's drive-thru where I would order breakfast and coffee; my sole moment of happiness, or at least contentment, was an hour of sheer escapism. This came in the form of a show called The Lost World which aired on Sunday mornings. I'd eat, drink, and watch this sexier, somewhat more adult version of Land of the Lost, a childhood favorite, and for that hour remember what it was like to be footloose and fancy free, without adult responsibilities, worries and woes. I'd also permit myself the conceit of imagining myself in Hollywood, participating in the fabulous (I thought) world of make-believe. In point of fact, I'd sometimes sing the lyrics to 3 Doors Down's song "Be Like That:"

He spends his nights in California
Watching the stars on the big screen
Then he lies awake and he wonders
"Why can't that be me?"
'Cause in his life he's filled with all these good intentions
He's left a lot of things he'd rather not mention right now
Just before he says goodnight
He looks up with a little smile at me and he says
If I could be like that
I would give anything
Just to live one day in those shoes
If I could be like that
What would I do?
What would I do? Yeah....

Now in dreams we run

Cut to twenty years later, and I am on my way to a Halloween party in Los ANgeles. I stop off at my friend's house so we can go as a group, and lo and behold, there is a beautiful blonde present. It turns out to be the former star of The Lost World. I get an unexpected chance to tell her how her show provided the spiritual morphine I needed to get through a tough time in life, and the following year, she is my red carpet date at the Writers of the Future Awards in Hollywood. My sole remaining wish is that I could travel back in time and tell the 2000-ish version of myself that, well, now in dreams we are.

Was it chance? Was it the sort of happy accident to which Bob Ross liked to refer? Or was it Fate, or God's will, or some other sort of blind inevitability that surpasseth human understanding? I don't suppose I will ever know. What I do know is that whether it is all written in stone somewhere we cannot see, or whether it really is nothing but a series of random dice-rolls which occasionally run to hot streaks, it happened, and, thankfully, will happen again. We cannot avoid accidents, but the happier ones, like an episode of The Joy of Painting are always welcome.