Yesterday, I re-posted on Facebook the two images you see--they show Joyce and me in fourth grade. (We were not in the same school system, as you will read below.)
As I looked at the post yesterday, it hit me--again--how improbable--no, impossible--it was that we should ever even meet--much less fall in love and marry.
When I was in fourth grade (1953-54), we were living in Enid, Oklahoma, in the north central part of the state. I had not the faintest wisp of a cloud of an idea that we would ever live anywhere else. Mom and Dad were both teaching there (Dad at Phillips University, Mom at Emerson Junior High School); my maternal grandparents lived only a few blocks away; we, as far as I could imagine, were set.
When she was in fourth grade (ain't gonna tell you the years), Joyce was living with her mother and father in Firestone Park (Akron, Ohio). Her dad worked for Firestone; her mom, for the Akron City Schools. She had uncles and aunts and cousins living nearby. She, I'm sure, could imagine no other life.
And yet ...
We moved to Ohio ... I graduated from Hiram College ... I started teaching middle school in Aurora, Ohio ... I decided in the summer of 1969 to take a grad-school class at Kent State ...
Joyce stayed in Firestone Park ... graduated from Wittenberg ... was home that summer ... decided to take a grad-school class at Kent State ...
We were both "closed out" of the classes we'd wanted (not the same class, by the way) and ended up in a course--American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, et al.)-- a class in Satterfield Hall.
Where we met.
Now that seems improbable enough, doesn't it?
But don't even think about the larger improbabilities. We each had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two great-great-great grandparents, sixty-four ... you do the math: It gets very numbery, very soon.
All those hundreds of people--thousands, really ... tens of thousands, if you keep going back)--had to meet, hook up, have children who lived long enough to meet another of our direct ancestors, hook up, have children who lived long enough ...
So, what I'm saying is: It's impossible that Joyce and I met and married forty-nine years ago.
And then ... a coincidence.
I've been reading my way through the novels of Wilkie Collins (1824-99), generally in the order that he wrote them, and the past few days I've started his 1876 novel, The Two Destinies, which tells the story of two children--a boy, a girl--who are great friends in childhood and eventually realize they want to be more than that. They believe they are destined for each other.
The problem: He is the son of a prosperous landowner; she, the daughter of one of his employees. So ... anything more than a childhood friendship is ... impossible.
His father discovers the increasing seriousness of the relationship, fires his employee, who quickly moves away with the daughter. The grieving son cannot find her--though he still dreams of her, still considers her his future.
I've reached the part where they're now in their twenties. I don't know what's going to happen, though I have hopes, of course.
We'll see.
But that novel has been making me think more and more about the improbability/impossibility of human encounters--and of any of those encounters ever turning into something ... more.
Yet they do, don't they? Sometimes for good--sometimes for ill. But all ... impossible ...
No comments:
Post a Comment