I wonder if everyone plays the "What if?" game from time to time? That is, what if this happened instead of what really happened and how that would have changed a complex series of events? Like you start out your front door and then remember you forgot to bring the letter you wanted to mail and you go back to get it, just as a piano falling from the 12th floor crashes onto your entrance. And would have ended your stay on this planet had you not returned for the letter. What if?
What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people. A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old. We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me. Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.
One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday. I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come." I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.
At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."
She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot. What if?
What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people. A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old. We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me. Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.
One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday. I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come." I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.
At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."
She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot. What if?
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