The Book of Ten

Decalogue: Chance

 Decalogue: Chance n it’s May, birthday month, daylily month, and here’s one called “artist at Work”—pale yellow segments with a dark red throat. Hemerocallis, “beauty for a day.” too easy to say our lives are like that, blooming once, flaring up, going out, like candles on a cake, the chocolate one my mother baked each birthday. Lately they seem more like children, some bratty dick and Jane sticking their tongues out, waving to us from the back window of a long, black car—goodbye! goodbye!—while we wipe away the tears. how random the world has seemed, despite the daylily’s scarlet throat, its , varieties. the news like fat hands around a slender neck— a shooting at a school, tornadoes in oklahoma scattering houses like so many leaves, while passengers fell from a plane over the Congo, not to mention war in afghanistan. and the film i watched last night was hardly a comfort, full of violence and despair. i saw then how anyone could be the cabdriver who picks up the murderer or the one who drives on by, you could be the murderer’s little sister run over by a drunken tractor or the girls who smile in the pictures he sees in the photo shop. that’s the director’s point, i guess. Sure, we’ve all had close calls—not just the public ones, the Cuban Missile Crisis, but pneumonia that tried to smother me throughout my childhood, turn my lungs to paper. the stranger who followed me twenty miles home and drove off when he saw i was eight months pregnant. even late last night  when i smelled smoke and found the lampshade by my bed about to burst into flame. think of all the times the truck swerved just in time, the car ran the red light just after i passed. and there are moments so ablaze with grace they shine in the dark like a whole garden of daylilies, like the story a friend told once, a group of us sitting on the porch in the ample lap of July talking about our childhoods, the ones we survived and those we didn’t. My friend said at twelve he came home early from school and found his mother in the basement weeping and never knew why. years later she told him she’d been about to kill herself when he walked in and then she didn’t. Some say god’s grace, not chance. does it matter? all i know is that there are little moments, too, when things seem to go your way. today for instance, graduation day at the college where i teach, but when i went to pick up my cap and gown, there wasn’t anything with my name on it and so i was excused from going, this bright May day, when it was  degrees and  percent humidity at  a.m.—did i mention that graduation is always held outdoors? and that’s how i came to be sitting here this morning, ogling the daylilies, their red lips, their pink tongues, happy, for once, to have the chance. ...