Life's Close Calls

As invariably happens while driving down the Eisenhower Highway in Chicago, a car turned into my lane unexpectedly last Saturday, causing me to swerve to my left, honk my horn and shout out a few obscenities. My daughter, her boyfriend and I could easily have become statistics. 

After our close call, I posed the question, “How is it that natural selection hasn’t already taken care of this guy?”

“That’s just it,” answered my daughter. “He would have survived but we would have died.”

Perhaps she’s right that the morons among us will end up living the longest, but if I’m honest with myself, I could easily be considered Exhibit A if we were to test this hypothesis. If I carefully consider the number of close calls I’ve survived in my life, I probably should have died a dozen times over by now. That I’m still standing is a miracle, and as I look around my fellow flawed humans, it’s a wonder that any of us survive to see middle-age, much less our 80s or 90s or beyond.

Even overlooking the shameful acts of my youth when stupidity reigned, I can count off loads of times when luck kept my heart beating. Just seven years ago, the brake fluid leaked out of my Honda Civic while I was approaching the busiest intersection in all of Illinois (or so I’m told – Highway 83 and North Avenue), and when I pumped the brakes to no avail, I accelerated through the intersection unscathed. That should not have happened. When I tumbled down a ski slope in Crested Butte in 1990, I broke a vertebra in my neck, but didn’t sever my spine. When I took a left turn last year despite my vision being significantly blocked by a parked bus, I avoided the car that suddenly appeared from behind the bus by inches.

Luck. All luck.

And two Saturdays ago, my wife stood on top of a chair in our first-floor bathroom, only to lose her footing, fall sideways onto the toilet and break six ribs. Painful and scary, for sure, but we consider the fall to be the best worst-case scenario, because just 12 inches to her left could have meant cracking her skull or breaking her neck on the pedestal sink. We’ll take the six broken ribs, thank you very much.

But how are any of us still standing? Paul Simon once sang, “The planet groans every time it registers another birth,” and I find it mind-boggling that humanity has managed to amass 8.1 billion specimens - that instead of groaning the Earth doesn’t chuckle, “Here comes another one, but no matter, he’ll be dead in short order.”

Perhaps the planet would be better off if the more moronic among us weren’t so lucky. But I’m not about to raise my hand to go first.