Just When You Thought You Were in the Clear - March 7 2026

 

Just When You Thought You Were in the Clear

March 7 2026

Things happen suddenly.

Or slowly, then all at once.

And sometimes, they don't happen at all.

In fact, more often than not

it turns out that way.

Just think of the possibilities

of all these could-have-beens.

The contingencies you might have imagined

that never materialized,

the forks in the road not taken

that would have led who-knows-where.

And the succession of forks,

extending its tendrils

in an ever-expanding web

until even an alternate universe

couldn’t hold them all.

The real question is

do things just happen

or must someone make them?

Can you simply wait

or is agency everything?

Remembering

that even best laid plans

are bound to fail. 

And remembering

that there are unintended consequences 

to any act,

adding more forks

you never even came to.

Even if the act

is choosing not to;

because passivity, after all

is just as much a choice.

So either way

agency or happenstance

the universe doesn’t bend to your will,

and you aren’t the master of your destiny

you thought you were.

Things just happen, the good and the bad,

and you’ll sooner or later find yourself 

blindsided, sucker-punched, and gobsmacked

just when you thought

you were in the clear.

When all you can do

is to gather yourself

and doggedly persevere.

There’s a shit storm pelting down

and you’re only choice is forging ahead,

hands

over your head

and eyes on the ground

hoping nothing hits you.

Which, of course, it eventually will. 

I loved this piece, one of the New Yorker’s “Personal History”. columns. Baseball and dogs, two great loves of mine.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/roger-and-the-smooth-fox-terriers#rid=944a6aa6-aa26-48ff-891d-b1ef71c270c9&q=fox+terrier

The following paragraph, which appears near the end, really struck me, and it was the seed of this poem. What gave it that weight? It was the suddenness of things. The arbitrariness. The randomness of an indifferent universe. Or, as the vernacular has it, how “shit happens”, and there’s nothing you can do. And I fully realize that only a congenital pessimist like me could ever have written this poem. (Tasha is a beloved fox terrier who serendipitously came to the author after a succession of losses. I think it’s my love of dogs that made this hit me particularly hard.) 

Last November 16th, I posted a picture on Facebook of Tasha for her ninth birthday. On December 1st, without warning, she died of internal bleeding caused by an undiagnosed cancer. She’d been especially happy that day, because her dog friend Staar was back from Thanksgiving. She had leaped and played and raced around Riverside Park and eaten a big breakfast when we came back home. She was fine all day and ate a good dinner. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up and knew something was not right. By four in the morning, she had died at the animal hospital, despite their urgent efforts to save her.