No predictions possible...

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision

by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred

to call the powers behind the Universe.”

– Arthur C. Clark: 2010: Odyssey Two

It was early in the morning, and I was reading as is my ‘day starting’ custom.

I heard a noise and looked up. Several large black cows were standing just on the other side of the back fence, giving me the eye. It was Tulsa, Oklahoma and I was sitting on my Brother-in-law’s back porch. I looked absently mindedly at them as my mind drifted to the circumstances responsible for bringing me to his home.

Mark and I don’t see one another as much as we might like. As time and gravity have taken their toll, traveling back and forth doesn’t often happen. He doesn’t fly, and it is a long drive from Tulsa to Tucson. He is also loath to leave his family of four of the loveliest ‘tailless’ Manx cats with a sitter, so he tends not to travel.  The "...mountain..." had come to "...Mohammed...".

Mark is a friendly sort of fellow, a quiet and gentle soul. As long as I have known him, he has been as consistently thoughtful as anyone in the constellation of my life. Additionally, Mark bears significant responsibility for the circumstances in which I currently live. I suppose to be fair; it is the life ‘we’ live, meaning the nearly forty-year cohabitation I have shared with his sister Molly Ann…a journey for which he played a pivotal role.

When Mark and I met in the fall of 1974, we were students and subjects in a nutritional research study.  He was an undergraduate in civil engineering and me in my first year of a doctorate. The announcement on the bulletin board suggested that for an investment of several weeks, subjects would receive three meals a day AND a one-hundred and forty-dollar stipend. Free food? Money? This sort of thing was music to the ears of a poor graduate student. I signed up immediately.

As it turned out, the ‘food’ was horrible. The ‘pre-project’ test food was ‘bait and switch’ for even worse tasting meals…if worser were a word, it would not be strong enough for the salty pink pudding we ate three times a day. Every calorie put in our bodies was custom tailored to our specific metabolic needs, AND everything we evacuated was collected and analyzed - everything.

Solid waste was captured in a humiliatingly make-shift throne on the top of a desk in a small open room. The receptacle was infused with nitrogen gas to keep our ‘material’ oxygen free. I get it, the image this creates defies adequate description.

Liquid dehydration was another matter. For convenience, each of us carried a small gym bag with a toluene spiked canister tucked inside and out of sight. For those that care and by now may be thinking this is way too much information, toluene (a benzene derivative smelling like paint thinner) was a preservative and if touched by any, shall we say delicate parts, burned like the hounds of hell!!

The above story is simply to indicate the way Mark and I met. It is foreplay for what in the end turned out to be the happiest and longest standing relationship of my life.

After the study, Mark and I became good friends – friendship that continues to this day. But this is a bit ahead of the story.

One Thursday, I got a call from him saying he needed some help. His out of town girlfriend was coming for a weekend visit. “Great,” I replied. “And?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The deal is that my sister Molly will be here from Washburn University in Topeka. Would you take her out Friday night?” After giving it too little thought, I said, "Sure, what do I do?" Mark told me to pick her up at his apartment at seven Friday evening. I had not gone on very many blind dates in my life, but I figured I could handle anything for a couple of hours.

At the time, I was in the neighborhood of my late twenties, happy to be alone, and completely ignorant of the potential benefits that a shared life might bring. Like so many things, the future was unknown, unpredictable and as it turned out, the result inconceivable.

At seven sharp, I knocked on the door of his apartment, unsure whether I might have acted a little too hastily in agreeing to this. I mean, what if his sister was a dud, and worse, what if she came back again and he wanted me to take her out again. These thoughts and a myriad of others shot through my mind between the time my knuckles hit the door, and it opened. When it did, there stood a cute young girl with short blondish hair, wearing glasses.

“Hi,” I said. I’m Ted.” She replied she was Molly and I thought: How bad could this be?

The evening was not awful, but it did NOT go well. I exhausted every tool in my social communication kit and for my trouble, got abruptly brief answers…little more than single word grunts. As I dropped her off and the door closed, there was a sigh of relief by both of the evening’s participants…both hoping we would never have an uncomfortable night like that again. (Later, I discovered she thought I would NOT be quiet long enough for her to say anything).

The next year, she transferred to the University of Missouri and lived in a dormitory right next to the building where graduate students in my area had their offices.  We saw each other from time to time on campus and smiled politely. Then for unknown reasons, I found myself looking forward to seeing her. It wasn’t long before what had been a terrible start, turned into what has been a long and satisfying partnership.

As I sat on Mark’s back porch watching the cows, more than forty-five years after meeting this man, it is still hard to believe he was unconsciously responsible for life-changing events for Molly and me. Watching those cows, I thought of so many people and places I have met and seen that hinged on a single and completely unpredictable experience or event. I traced back any number of circumstances in my life that would NOT have happened if the timing of the universe had been different…had I not said agreed to apparently innocuous requests.

I have long since stopped trying to understand the complex serendipity of life and the intellectually driven cosmos...its multifactorial process far above my pay grade. I have simply come to accept that it is and am grateful for so many lovely end results, the most significant of which was agreeing to that blind date.

ted