My dad told us a story recently, one we’d never heard before, about how he and my grandfather thawed out the frozen gas line under their house.

They lit a wad of newspapers on fire, then lay in the crawlspace under the house and held the flame to the gas pipe. My grandmother stood at the stove in the kitchen just above them, turning the burner knob on and off to see if it worked.

Eventually, it did. Without blowing up the house, my grandfather, my grandmother, and of course, my father, who had not yet pro-created. My brothers and I were amazed at the stupidity of this practice and at our infinite good fortune that, foolish or not, Dad survived to marry Mom. He might have been blown sky-high and landed dead. Or been badly incapacitated. Or orphaned and sent off to live with relatives in Chicago, or Sicily.

But that’s all conjecture. It’s moot. What matters is, they held a flame to a frozen gas line, didn’t blow themselves to Kingdom Come, and I’m here to tell the tale.

That got me to thinking about all the other what ifs and close calls in my personal history. How my very existence relied on the twists and turns, big and small, of Fate.

My grandmother left Naples, Italy in April, 1914, bound for America, on the last ship crossing the Atlantic. The very last ship. Due to the first World War it would be three more years before one sailed again. How close did she come to literally “missing the boat?” If the donkey had plodded along just a bit slower. Or the wagon had thrown a wheel. Or the train had derailed. Or she had cried a few more good-bye tears in her father’s arms. She wouldn’t have made it to Syracuse, N.Y. to meet the man who would be my grandfather.

And my grandfather might have married the girl he had an affair with on his ship back in 1909. Earlier, in the Army in Sicily, he could have had his foot amputated like the doctor advised and been a cripple, and never come to the US at all.

Back to my dad, who survived his gas line thawing days to grow up and enlist in the Army in World War II. Stationed on a South Pacific Island, he sat down one day on a  box to write a letter home. A Japanese plane flew over and strafed the area, so fast he hardly knew what happened. Luckily, the shots missed him, and the box he sat one, which was full of dynamite.

The more I thought about the cases of pneumonia before antibiotics, childbirths at home with no doctor attending, lightning strikes that just missed the house, cows and horses with vicious kicks, tractors that tipped over, rusty nails loaded with tetanus…

I was laughing, crying, and getting a terrific headache.

If my brothers and I had never been born, what about my nieces and nephews? Two would have never been born at all. And the other two, adopted separately from Guatemala, would be alive, but not here with us. Or with each other as brother and sister. What would their names be? Where would they live? How would they live? It was all too much to contemplate.

Stop a moment yourself and think. What in your own past might have kept you from being here? It could be a grand scale event–a war, earthquake, or Holocaust. Or a seemingly trivial and insignificant something. A plane grounded, a letter misaddressed, a phone call unanswered.

Why and how do these moments in time happen? Or not? Our histories overlap and intertwine in twisted patterns as complex and inexplicable as our DNA. You can credit, or curse God, the Universe, or Fate. Choose your creed.

Regardless, here you are.

And here I am. Because my dad did not blow himself up thawing a frozen gas line.

Advertisement