I didn't ask for it, but it is mine nonetheless. That is what the year has taught me. About all of my life. Doesn't matter how it wound up barreling down my avenue of life---it is mine. As someone recently said, "It isn't the selection of music you hear, it's how you dance to it."

New Avenues

"I didn't ask for this," I said to God, standing on the deck. "I didn't ask for this." My grown daughter was drunk and plowed into the rear of a vehicle parked over on the shoulder of that four lane, killing the 60+ year old former school teacher who'd gotten out of the vehicle and was standing in front of it, and her new daughter in law who was seated in the back seat. The older woman's daughter, another passenger, was injured as well. It's amazing my daughter survived. That was a few weeks ago. Three families explosively met and their lives have intertwined. All are good families. Every single life altered forever. Three women who will not--because they are dead or incarcerated--will not see their daughters marry. They won't see their grandchildren born. Their menfolk mourn, and will do without them. Even though my daughter survived, there are nonetheless three families whose members died--or might have well have died--in that horrifying instant. I didn't ask for this. My wife's leukemia. My estrangement. I've probably actively gone out looking for the unfortunate, bizzare things that have filled my life. I didn't ask for her leukemia, but I accepted it as part of what God dishes out to us to test us. But this--I didn't ask for this; there was no Divine Intervention here, just a woman who wasn't able to manage what was going on her life and turned to booze and wound up killing two people because she couldn't handle her life. I didn't ask for this. The victims and the perpetrator--life has all dancing a macabre dance of grief and disheartenment. There is symmetry there, yes, but it still isn't right.

A Whiff of Mortality

I've been terribly sick, but much better now. The type of 'much better now' where you're grateful you don't feel so bad. Doctors decided I'd had piggybacking viruses, one after the other. Four weeks of being really sick. It gives you a clear perspective on your life. I have two wonderful chlldren that I love the most in the world, but for whom I'm simply an acoutrement in their lives, not a part of it. I have a wife I love very deeply, for whom I am an appendage of some value. I'm the guy who has the apartment in which a self-absorbed 21 year old lives on the other side for whom I'm an unnecessary impediment to his living a life of youthful abandon. I have had three loved family member die this past twelve months. Two of them gave no though to me in their passing but used me to unknowingly handle things they didn't want to in their passage. Younger people I guided or assisted these past few years have strayed into drugs, or other forms of self-destruction. A drug addict I got into rehab only to see them emerge and crash and burn. I'm the simple good guy who always thought about others before himself. Yeah, I'd put myself out there, incur debt, or provide knowledgable advice or guidance to them. And it looks like it was all for naught. The opportunities for betterment came to nothing. I'm not depressed, I'm not down. But in looking at my life I see a trail of assists to others that failed. Plantings that bore no fruit. I see a failed garden. And I intend to find out how I failed, and to try again and not repeat whatever mistakes I made.