How easily it all could have changed
November 11-17, 2024
By Jay Edwards
“God doesn’t put that much prep into something that is insignificant.” — Shannon L. Alder
Those three sisters known as the Fates popped into my head as I stared at the house in Sioux City I hadn’t laid eyes on in half a century.
We were on our way, by car, to northern Montana, when I decided to try and find the street where I’d spent a few years as a boy. We’d lived there when I was in the first, second and third grades, before moving to Oklahoma City where I’d be in the fourth grade, playing right field for my school team, the Red Foxes. My first and last year of baseball. Something about talent.
We moved one more time, back home to Little Rock, because Mom told Dad she was going with or without him. I don’t know what that would have meant for me and my two brothers, had she gone, and thankfully never had to find out as Dad loaded us up again one morning and headed southeast.
As I stared at the house decades later, I wondered how different my life would have been had we stayed. I thought of the girl sitting next to me, KM, my wife now of 44 years, and how we of course would not have met. Not only that, but a Hawkeye instead of a Hog doesn’t feel right at all. But the Fates spin their threads and one day you decide to turn right instead of left and the future becomes totally different. So KM and I did meet, and in 1980 I watched her walk towards me down the red-carpeted aisle of St. Andrews Cathedral on Louisiana Street.
After we correctly repeated all our lines back to Father Royce Thomas, as the late-great Reverend Jim Workman (representing my Methodist half) looked on, we kissed, turned, and walked out, at a quicker pace than we had entered. A photo was taken at just the right moment to catch my lips form the word, “Whew.”
From there we moved into the back seat of my father’s black Olds 98, which he no longer needed after his heart had given out three months earlier, on a night I still see clearly, watching my brother Dean try desperately to bring him back.
Three months later was a happier night, with Dean as my best man, not to mention chauffeur of the 98.
He drove us across the river to the parish hall of Immaculate Conception, where KM had gone through the eighth grade before entering Mount St. Mary’s in the late summer of 1971. At about the same time I was getting off a bus, not far away at Catholic High.
I almost didn’t get into Catholic High at all. I have a 1971 letter from Father Tribou, the principal, to my parents, in which he basically said thanks but no thanks. Something about there not being enough room.
But Mom, who was a force of nature in her own right, called my grandfather, who had among his impressive credentials, a former presidency of Hendrix College. In a letter to Father Tribou my grandfather wrote what a fine young man I was and that he was sure I would be a credit to Catholic High (I’m reminded of the wisdom of George Costanza, who once said to Jerry, “Remember, it’s not a lie, if you believe it.”)
So I got in (“We need the dues!”).
KM and I would formerly meet three years later but it took me another year after that to work up the courage to ask her out on a date.
I’m sure I gave the Fates, fits.
