The self-styled philosopher with whom I share this little concrete cage tells me this: a normal life is like, say, a fancy ring with jewels. It’s your basic circle, birth to death, studded with a few major turning points. But I’ve had a lot of time for reading and thinking lately, and I don’t agree. I say life is more like a plain gold band. My old man’s wedding ring, something like that. A smooth, impenetrable surface that goes forever around, without a seam. 
 
Sure, every life has its obvious events—graduations, weddings, funerals. My day in court. But just because they’re big and colorful like gems on a ring doesn’t mean they’re important, not really. There are other moments—secret, hidden moments—when the real important changes happen, and they happen totally by chance. By the blind whim of fortune, completely unpredictable and beyond anyone’s control. And the worst part of it is, they’re happening continuously. Every minute of every day, some tiny event is happening that turns your life in a whole new direction, and it will never be the same again.
 
Take for instance a man, a nice regular guy, a husband and father. Let’s say his thoughts are full of business and family concerns. It’s just small everyday stuff: one client isn’t returning his calls, others seem to have changed their expectations. His teenage son has had a little trouble at school and his wife was in a bad mood again this morning. Anyway, his mind is so busy with all these things that he forgets to fill his tank and runs out of gas. He walks to a station, gets a can full of gas, and as he’s tipping it into his tank, the gasoline spills on his wrist, soaking the leather band of his watch.
 
He washes his hands, and even rinses off the watchband. But it still smells of gasoline so strongly that he can’t wear it. So he removes the band from the watch, throws it away, makes a mental note to buy a new one soon, and puts the watch in his pocket. But he’s a busy guy. Days go by and he doesn’t get around to buying a new watchband; he just fishes in his pocket whenever he wants to know the time.
 
So, gradually, he becomes a little less punctual than had been his habit, because of the inconvenience of looking at his watch. Mornings at the corner diner, in his usual booth where he can’t see a clock, he lingers longer and longer over his coffee and newspaper. He resists reaching into his pocket. One day, almost an hour later than his old schedule had dictated, he’s paying his check when his son and two friends walk into the diner. Clearly, they’re cutting school again. Uh-oh. The instant they see him, they turn in a panic, scramble out the door, and sprint across the busy street. He’s furious. He chases them, and as he enters the street at a blind run, a Jeep rounds the corner and hits him.
 
Let’s say the man spends two weeks in the hospital with a broken hip and assorted minor injuries. His son, feeling guilty now, tries harder at school as his father recovers, and succeeds for a time. The man’s wife comes to the hospital frequently to visit. Then, on her third day there, she has lunch in the crowded cafeteria. Since there are so few empty seats, she sits across from an attractive man in a white lab coat who also seems to be alone. He's a doctor from another city, recently divorced, who's visiting the hospital on a short research project. The injured man’s wife and the doctor feel an unexpected and irresistible magnetic pull between them, and before the husband has recovered enough to go home, his wife is deep in an affair with the out-of-town doctor.
 
So, of course, their marriage comes to an end, accompanied by the expected histrionics. Within a year, she has moved to the other city and married the doctor. She has never been happier. Her ex-husband is deeply depressed and not able to be much of a father to their son, of whom he retains custody. Now, the son—the son is so shaken by all this that, defying all expectations, he improves his attendance and his grades, and even makes new, more law-abiding friends. He does very well!  But it soon becomes clear that he needs a break from the dark moods and the new drinking habits of his father, and so he goes to visit his mother and her new husband.
 
Now let’s say the mother’s next-door neighbors have a son near his age, and soon the two are hanging out together, discovering they have quite a bit in common. The neighbor kid is bold, a born leader. His visiting friend is the perfect follower, a gullible idiot swept to and fro like trash in the wind. So the son stumbles along behind his persuasive new acquaintance, worried and mumbling, but also grinning like some kind of dim-witted sidekick, happy to have an exciting comrade. Before a week is out, they've been caught burglarizing a fast food joint on a nearby highway. Busted. But not only that; in the neighbor kid’s car is a sizable bag of marijuana. Enough for real trouble. The son’s protestations of ignorance go unheard. Busted big-time.
 
So while the boy sits in his cell, in juvey detention with a morose criminal stranger, he has quite a bit of time to think and to write. He wonders about his unhappy father and his unfaithful mother. Should he hate them or love them?  Is it all their fault?  Could he have made better decisions, or is there something defective deep inside him, so he never really had a chance?  The questions crowd up around him like a swarm of gnats. How did it come to this?  Where did it begin to go wrong?  Could it really have something to do with his father accidentally running out of gas one day?  Hardly likely. Yet…what then?  He feels completely stupefied. At what point in a long chain of unseen events could any of them—father, mother, son—have changed the course of their lives?  
 
He searches for reasons, for decisive moments, for obvious turning points. There are none; the ring is just a smooth gold circle, refusing to reveal a single answer. Everything happens by the purest mathematics of chance. Plain dumb luck, just where you happen to be at the moment you happen to be there. The ridiculously trivial intersection of times and places, that’s all there is.
 
Sure, he thinks fondly of happier times, like wrestling with his dad on the living room floor as his mother laughed and clapped her hands, that year back in grade school when everything seemed to go so well. And he thinks that maybe there could be more of those good times in the future; it’s within the realm of possibility. Isn’t it?
 
Sometimes he thinks that when he gets out, he’ll get a gun; other times he feels revolted by that thought, and dreams instead of writing a famous novel. He has hopes, like anyone would. Hopes.
 
But the only thing he actually knows, and he knows it beyond a shadow of a doubt, is this: in the whole universe, in the whole big, revolving, starry conflagration of disaster of which he is the absolute center, nothing—nothing—will ever be the same again.
 
 
© Brent Robison 2019