Noli Irritare Leones

Wes poses a set of questions:

How about any of you? What would you be doing in your alternate life? Do you find anything helpful in thinking along these lines?

Alternate life number one: In this life, I didn’t get a UTI that turned into kidney infection right after college, and I was perhaps a little more daring than I’d really be, and joined the Peace Corps for a couple of years. How does my life change? Well, I bypass the experience of looking for work while both ill for a year (it took a while to get correctly diagnosed) and hitting a serious recession. Probably I wind up doing what the sister did who actually did go into the Peace Corps after college, and go back to graduate school afterwards, and wind up in academia (this was my original plan, before I started to question how marketable the Ph.D. I meant to get would be). And probably I’d have been OK with that life.

Alternate life number two: This is the scary one, the one that might have happened if I hadn’t met Joel just when I did. I was in a fairly routine computer operator job (it would be a couple of years before I found more interesting and challenging work), and didn’t see much to hold me to where I was, so I was looking into various opportunities to do something more inspiring. The sort of scary one is one I might not have actually wound up able to do, since I don’t know whether there were any denominational requirements to it, but since I get to imagine anything, let’s say I could. There was a house in New York City called Covenant House, which provided services for homeless and runaway youth. I regularly volunteered, at this time, in a ministry to homeless people. I might well have liked the work. I’d have been close to family, since I grew up in the suburbs of NYC. And I gather the house is still operating. What’s scary about it, though, is that the man who was running it at the time, Father Bruce Ritter, later got accused of sexual relations with several of the teenage boys resident at the charity. Would I have seen things I found suspicious? Regretted not doing anything about it? Or wound up disbelieving the allegations (which Fr. Ritter denied even as he resigned), and trusting Father Bruce Ritter to the end? Who knows?

Alternate life three: When Joel was in former Yugoslavia in 1992, he suggested I consider moving with him to Osijek, where we would assist peace groups. He now believes he was manic at the time. I wasn’t, and though I supported his summer working in a war zone, actually moving to a war zone for a longer term was more than I was willing to do. Given what we’ve since learned about Joel’s health, this was probably a good choice.

I suppose I could take this further and think of all the alternate things I dreamed of doing as a child, but I guess I’ll stop here. Somehow my alternate lives all sound more adventurous than my real one (though not always overall better). Maybe it’s because the dramatic things I didn’t do stick in my mind more than the undramatic things I didn’t do?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 6:48 am and is filed under Memory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.