In light of the fact that the current background music I'm listening to is Deconstruction by the Indigo Girls, I'm going to try to get through this entire post in one song.

Laying in bed the other night, Eva and I got to talking about our meeting. How many strange occurances had to happen for us to cross paths...let alone get together. If evolution isn't your bag...as in you believe in divine creation and that the created looked alot like us...then this won't quite make sense. But bare with me, consider all of the chances it took for lightning (energy) to strike something and a life spontaneously created. Consider the huge percentages against it ever getting a brain, it's bizarre chances of ever dividing and having progeny, it's nervous system being formed, or an eyeball even, fins and tails, hair...fingernails. Well this is the company we keep.

(the song just ended, so I didn't make it)

There were obstacles stacked against us. Fate? I dont' know about that. But there are bulletpoints on a path and somehow it worked. Had I never gone to Sweden, or sent an email on a given date, had Eva not gone to work on such and such day or not gone to the bar the night she met Leila...any event could have altered a black dot being planted on the path.

And then I considered, as an aside, past lives. How lucky I am. What I must have done before to allow me to be in such good fortune. This led to many considerations:
I must have been a child who died shortly after being born...thus never having the chance to do wrong. (forgive the lack of original sin)
I must have been the ant that shared his food with a recklass grasshoper. We both died in some early frost, happy and full.
I must have been a volunteer who had the brains to be President, but opted to build 3-room houses in some third-world country and died of Malaria 53 houses into my stay.
I must have been a mother of 5 children. This not being altogether special, but the fact that each child felt loved, is. It didn't matter if the daughter was first borne or third borne or the baby of the family. I kept the same amount of photographs and gave the same amount (with inflation) to their college educations. I died in a car accident on the way home from an after church ice cream social.
I must have been a very common person who opened doors for the elderly and women with push-carriages, and spent every saturday afternoon playing checkers with anyone willing to play checkers at the old-folks home. I died in my sleep. Peacefully. A stroke. I didn't feel a thing, except the sensation of being born again...c-section. A baby girl. Springfield Missouri...to Andy and Frankie Wilkinson.

This is why I'm lucky. It's luck. I must be reaping the rewards of someone else in someone else's body. I should leave bits of offerings everywhere I go. Breadscraps to pidgeons and change to the man in Brussel Noord who holds the door with one hand and an old Quick cup in the other.

After all, I want the one after me to be just as lucky.

IN THE NEWS:
Forgea the dog, who was unintentionally left alone on a crippled tanker on April 2 after the cruise ship Norwegian Star rescued her owner and 10 members of his crew, arrived safely in Honolulu Thursday morning.