|
 You
know, until about a decade ago, I never used to be a believer
in conspiracy theories. I'd always thought that the Warren Commission
was right all along with the "single bullet" theory,
and that the Boston Red Sox lost game six of the 1986 World Series
because of the unpredictable bounce of a baseball. No longer!
There have been way too many unlikely things that have
happened to me since then. Too many, I'm beginning to think,
for mere coincidence to explain.
Let me give you a few examples. Many times,
here in the traffic-rich D.C. area, I've been caught in traffic
tie-ups caused by minor accidents, but they always seem to occur
in the lane I happen to be in. And
I've lost track of the times I've had to endure a lengthy wait
at a street corner waiting for traffic to clear, where if I'd
arrived at that corner just ten seconds earlier the
intersection would have been clear. And there's more. Supermarket
checkout lines I'm in are always the slowest; I never
seem to have a dollar bill crisp enough to work in a coin changer;
the Metrorail train that arrives at the station first is always
the one going in the wrong direction. It goes on and on and on.
Oh sure, I can imagine you saying, all
this is minor stuff, hardly worth mentioning. But there have
also been some larger events that have followed this pattern.
Two of them happened back in 1992. One was at the Hugo Awards
ceremony at the 1992 Worldcon (perhaps the topic of a different
essay), while the other happened a couple of months earlier that
year, the only time I've ever attended a high school reunion
(which turned out to be an alumni dinner for all graduates -
it was a small school!). It was a
long way to travel, way up to a small village in the northern
frontier of New York State, but I wanted to go because it had
been 25 years since my high school graduation and I felt almost
compelled to find out what had happened to the other
16 people in my graduating class. One of the few advantages in
attending a school that small is that you get to know everyone
of your classmates pretty well, and I thought if any
of them would go to an alumni event, it would be on some special
anniversary like the 25th.
Well, it didn't turn out anywhere near
what I'd expected. I did meet several people I knew
from other graduating classes, and also a few teachers (including
even my Kindergarten teacher), but there was only one other person
from my graduating class present that evening. I'd wanted to
give him one of my business cards, but there wasn't any way he
was going to look at it. Only a few years after graduation, he'd
had surgery to remove a brain tumor - and was now blind.
I only bring this up to support my growing
belief that there must be some cosmic consciousness
out there that seems to enjoy playing tricks on me. The most
recent evidence was the last weekend in January, when I finally
got around to replacing the balky and leaking kitchen faucet.
The new unit is much, much nicer but it took an amazingly long
time to get the job done. Most of the difficulty was in trying
to extract the old faucet. All the connectors were located in
places where only someone the size of a hobbit could get to,
and the thing was fighting me every step of the way. One of the
water supply line valves was stuck, and when I did manage to
get it closed off, it started to leak. And when the new unit
was finally in place, it turned out that the rubber gasket in
one of the water supply lines had broken. I couldn't get a new
one because the home supply store had closed just ten minutes
earlier. Just about everything that could have possibly gone
wrong, did. The faucet replacement was finally completed and
the leak got fixed the next morning, but for days I was still
checking practically every hour in the morbid expectation the
leak would return. (It didn't - but the faucet almost immediately
developed a slow drip that I was only able to fix by getting
the manufacturer to send me a new valve cartridge. Sheesh!)
After all that, I think I've about decided
that there just might be some kind of impish force at work out
there which uses Murphy's Laws as its charter. But every once
in awhile, this vast cosmic conspiracy shows you that it can
be benevolent as well as mischievous. The very next day, Nicki
and I were at Borders, and even though we had a coupon for 25%
off the price of one book, it turned out that we didn't find
anything we wanted. So we gave the coupon to the next person
in the checkout line, who was a bit surprised at the unexpected
good fortune. A bit less than an hour later we were in Sears,
getting ready to spend one of the gift cards we'd received for
Christmas, and as I was heading for the checkout line there,
a guy walked up to me and gave me a $5 Sears coupon he'd just
received for having some work done on his car. It was good only
for that day; he wasn't planning to buy anything else, and I
happened to be the first Sears shopper he saw. The funny thing
is, when we were in Borders, when I gave the discount coupon
to the next person in line, I saw that the book he was buying
was a thick trade paperback, the kind that sells for about $20.
And 25% off that is … five dollars.
I guess there must be some kind of Law
of Conservation of Karma as part of this great cosmic conspiracy.
Or, geez, maybe something even larger is in play. All
I know is, the next time I'm in Borders I'm going to see if I
can find some books by Charles Fort! |
