It should be granted that many things happen in life that we'll never know. That seems obvious. It is obvious. And yet, we shuffle through the laundromats of our destinies, glancing at the spinning clothes of other people's current lives, sometimes wondering where that shirt came from, but never considering how long that pair of pants will last given the huge hole in the butt.
Perhaps, though, like the centipede who was asked how he could coordinate all those legs, if we stopped to think of it we'd go mad.
At the nearby coffee mega-village, Melinda Cromwell ordered her coffee, "ordered" being the operative word.
"A breve caramel latte, half the usual caramel, extra milk, no whipped cream, nutmeg instead of cinnamon and I'm pretty sure if you don't get it right I'll purchase a graf zeppelin and crash it, burning, into your storefront on a lovely Sunday morning while little girls in their church dresses entertain thoughts of marriage as a chorus of angels sings above."
The young man at the counter clearly wanted to quit, this instant, and forget he ever heard the words "graf zeppelin". Instead, he asked "Um, Ashley, did you get that?"
"Yep. Caramel Flip Out, coming right up." Ashley was a pro, and still owned the church dress she wore at age twelve.
Reginald Boone stepped up. "A small cup of coffee, please. Do you have cream?"
Again, the young man contemplated working some place with fewer maniacs. Perhaps Congress, or Disneyland.
"Uh. Yes. Sir. Ten varieties of cream." Boone looked alarmed. The young man continued, hastily, "On that counter. The regular coffee's there, too. First one on the left." The man didn't feel up to explaining about the fifteen types of coffee from eight countries and four and a half styles of roast.
Boone accepted his small cup, filled it carefully to a half inch from the top, then enough cream to bring it within a quarter inch. He stirred with a red, plastic swizzle stick, wiped the stick dry and threw it and the napkin away, then stood waiting for Cromwell.
She stared at him. Really, she wanted to glare, a good old fashioned Bela Lugosi or Betty Davis glare, the kind of glare that makes men's stomaches feel as if they'd just swallowed a vat of lemon juice mixed with cow's liver. But all she could manage was an astonished stare.
"You don't exist," she finally said, and instead glared at Ashley, who had seen worse.
It's here, dear reader, that I make my point. Neither Cromwell nor Boone had met Ashley before. She entered their psycho-gravitational well, orbited eccentrically for a few minutes, then left. And while it doesn't enter into our story in any meaningful way, maybe it should be important to know that Ashley was thinking about a date she had tonight, a boy she'd only met a few days ago, and the fact that she needed to buy gas after work before she drove to Marley where he was going to school. She was saving money, didn't plan to work at a coffee mall all of her life, was smart enough, and pretty. In three hours fifteen minutes, she would finish filling her tank, go inside to pay, and a few minutes later be shot to death during a hold up. The robbers would be captured in ten days, and eventually convicted and serve long prison terms. The boy she was going to meet, Lenny, didn't have her phone number or last name, as is often the case for first dates, and so never knew that she hadn't stood him up, but instead had died abruptly and senselessly. Most people wouldn't have dwelled on this, but Lenny was sensitive and, every so often, would wonder whatever happened to Ashley, and feel sad he could never find out. During summer break, while vising home, Lenny would tell his mother about this, about never being sure what happened, about being sad, and she would say, "Honey, you think too much."
The caramel latte was handed over, with a smile, to Cromwell, who merely sniffed her thanks and stalked past Boone to an outside table where they would both sit. Their first real adventure was about to begin, though if told that, neither would have believed it.
Many people go around convinced that good things come into their lives by design (via the Herberts of the cosmos, perhaps), and bad things by accident. But even the gods are random interferers. Cromwell and Boone are, we'll see, very lucky. Ashley and Lenny are lucky, too. One is good luck, the other bad.
And you? And I? As we pass each other, and smile because we see in the other a possible friend, but today we're too busy to stop, to say hello, to risk our imperfect day with an even more imperfect encounter? Should we wonder what will become of the other? Should we invite the madness of chance?