Round and round we go

Dear You,

Sixteen years ago we bought the house we now live in from Frank and Susan. It was in beautiful condition, with everything we were looking for . . . but facing a busy highway. The owners were already thinking of the time when their young daughter might go down the driveway on a bike and into the path of a speeding truck. Or something like it. So they put the house up for sale and were having one just like it built in a quieter part of town.

Yesterday evening my wife took one of those Alumni Fund calls from her alma mater -- a young woman named Lauren, an art major and very chatty . . . and soon learned that she is the now-grown daughter of Frank and Susan. The two talked of the sandbox that once sat under the willow tree in the back yard -- the first removed to plant grass and the other felled after an ice storm ruined it. How they both love our community and what it's like to attend that university now . . . and it ended with, of course, a donation to the school.

Lauren did in fact go down the driveway, where she continues to have all sorts of life-changing collisions and seems happy with who and what and where she is just now, just as over those 16 years have we.

I write this not just because it's another example of that well-worn observation of "Small World, Isn't It?" but because of its larger truth: that despite the apparent chaos of the universe, there is fundamentally a roundness to it all. Every decision, every choice -- even when it seems meaningless at the time (or worse, an error!) -- ultimately comes to some (probably unforeseen) end that brings equilibrium. Should we not take comfort in this awareness? We just think such things are in novels, not for us.