I believe wholeheartedly that if you survive something as catastrophic as a plane crash, it is because there is very clearly work you need to do in this life.
Gene survived three before he pivoted into another career, and I give him credit both for staying and for knowing when to go.
Upon his early and unplanned retirement from air piloting, he moved to LA to tell stories about a motley crew of space adventurers in color-coordinated onesies as they navigated each week into and out of follies of culture and physics.
Certainly, this first iteration was problematic in any number of ways, but also it defied predominant cultural norms without apology. Hominids of various species, aliens and sapiens, astounding ethnic diversity that was literally never the subject matter. They just worked together bopping about the galaxy in their exploratory and quasi-peace keeping mission, occasionally at warp speed.
My father watched every single episode as it was broadcast live from 1966-1969, which happened to correspond to his sophomore-senior years of college. In my mind’s eye it is a dusky lounge full of plaid couches and corderouy in a time before the sweatpants and bare feet that dominated my college dorm years.
Well. Every episode except one.
In his junior year, at his 95% male-attended college, there was a senior dance to which all senior students received a ticket for themselves and for their dates, and 10% of juniors could attend - with dates - in a process meted out by lottery. A young man on my father’s hall was desperate to show off for his girlfriend, and plead with the uncoupled mates on the floor to enter the lottery and offer him their ticket should they win.
It was a simple request of something that cost these other gents a slip of paper and a check box, after which they could return to their regularly scheduled programming.
Except? All ten men were selected.
I believe wholeheartedly that if you enter a lottery for any reason and win, it is because fate is very clearly looking for a trap door.
As luck - and you - and I - would have it, my father took the bait and set out to locate a date.
Across the way was a women’s college, and occasionally these women would seek out coursework with the gents, as the University was larger and had more obscure upper division offerings. For the sake of this essay, I’ll say it was a chemistry class, although I can simultaneously be confident that my father did not spend much of his undergraduate time in the chemistry department. But as the story has factual holes a bit of telephone, and a lot of corduroy, so I’ll say that my father had a chemistry classmate from the women’s college, whom he phoned and invited to the dance.
She declined, with a line I’ve heard as this story has reverberated in my cellular matrix, “I’m planning on being busy.”
“But? I know someone you should meet.”
I often wonder if his next call felt perfunctory, or whether the fairy fingers reached through him as he dialed her floor and asked a woman he’d never met to a dance he had no intention to attend.
(You can guess what I prefer to believe).
Smart, and savvy, and possibly swayed by fairies, my mother said yes.
Well, she said yes and.
And I’d like to meet you first. How about Thursday?
They arranged a meeting in a neutral, public location - a gazebo somewhere between their relative living spaces. The dance was that weekend, and time was precious what with classes and studying and responsibility. In my mind it was late Indiana spring, before the air becomes oppressive with humidity but after the trees are filled with leaves and blossoms, although it was probably fall, which in Indiana, is equally magical.
As dusk arrived, my father walked her home, in the opposite direction of his own dorm where his friends and fellows had gathered to watch the latest StarTrek broadcast.
I see them walking in step slowly through a haze of fireflies as I hear the Shatner Bill perform opening lines, through a crackly broadcast in a television far, far away….
“To boldly go…”
That was it for them, and thus, for me. Destiny made quick work of an unbreakable bond, and twelve years later the possibility of me manifested during a January blizzard.
I believe that if you are breathing at this moment, that there is work for you to do. I believe stories change the world, and I believe that when fate declines the invitation but offers you a logical next step, you go boldly.
Thanks for reading,
K
Oh, Kari...you speak to my heart 💕