The Game of Life

1

We’re always a little carsick when we crest that last hill in the coast range and the Pacific comes into view, sparkling in sunlight or gray and choppy on a stormy day. My girls stretch to see the water, while Todd reminds them to stay safely buckled in. I roll down the window. “Smell that salt air,” I say, and we breathe it in. After the last fifty or so miles twisting through the Siuslaw National Forest on U.S. Route 20, we’re relieved to reach the coast. Todd parks and we walk down to the beach, perching on driftwood logs at the base of the sea wall to remove our shoes.

Twelve-year-old Ashley and I walk barefoot along the hard, wet sand left foamy by the outgoing tide. Ashley points to a place between the lines of waves. “Look, a seal!” A slick brown head bobs in the water, looking right at us with wide seal eyes.

“We saw seals at Camp Westwind,” Ashley says. Her sixth-grade camp, two weeks ago, was just up the coast from here. “Mom, did you know people used to think seals were mermaids?”

“I’ve heard that. You’d have to be out at sea for an awful long time to imagine a seal as a beautiful woman.”

“Half woman, half fish, Mom. I can see why. It’s their eyes.”

I watch the seal, who meets my gaze. The seal’s eyes do look human, almost as if she knows things I don’t. Ashley bends to look more closely at shell fragments in the wet sand. The seal ducks under a wave and disappears.

2

Severed between the elbow and wrist. She’d caught it in some kind of machinery.

“A tragedy,” Michael, my boss, said. “Keep José’s mother in your prayers.”

“Where does she work?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Michael answered. “They had just returned from a trip to Mexico, and now this.”

José and I teach at a small Christian college in Oregon. We’re both adjunct instructors, both new to the department. I hardly know him, really.

That evening I found more information online. It was a plant nursery. She’d been separating bulbs with some sort of hydraulic cutter. Coworkers rushed to her aid, recovered the severed arm, and gave it to the Life Flight paramedics. The reattachment surgery took more than ten hours.

The article didn’t mention that she’d just come back from Mexico. Jet lag, I thought. She was too tired to safely operate the machinery. Except that Mexico is, of course, in the same time zones as the western U.S. She may have been tired, but no more so than someone who just returned to Portland from Dallas.

Below the article was a space for comments. One reader, who sounded like a bossy older brother, said that machines such as this usually have safety features, which workers sometimes override in an effort to boost productivity.

Through misspellings and poor grammar, most of the comments blamed the victim. As much as I knew I shouldn’t, I found myself nodding in agreement. Agreeing so I could distance myself from the possibility of the blade falling on my mother, my husband, my children. I want to believe if we never override safety features, if we don’t go to work jetlagged, we’ll be safe. I want to think these things only happen to people who don’t speak English, to those without training, to those who don’t take precautions.

3

I place the tiny pink stick person into the plastic car that serves as my game piece.

“I’m going to see what my life would have been like if I hadn’t gone to college,” I tell my girls. They’re shocked.

“We always go to college when we play Life,” my eldest says.

“It’s the game of Life,” I tell her.

In this version of Life, from the eighties, higher education makes no difference. I select my occupation from the same set of cards as...