My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #28, February 1, 1999

A GAME OF PINBALL

I wonder sometimes about the kids who really believe they can plan every single step of their future. They seem to believe they will follow an orderly progression: get the degree, land the job, advance steadily up the corporate or professional ladder, make bunches of money, and retire. It's as if they see life as something like archery: if you practice the skills and judgment long enough, the arrow will go exactly where you aim it.

But I think life mostly doesn't work like that--accidents happen. The only thing that goes in a straight line from here to there is a highway, and even there, you can be diverted forever by fog or an eight-car pileup. What happens to us, it seems to me, is a lot more like pinball. People and events come into our lives and change us, and all of a sudden we find ourselves bouncing off in a different direction, ending up in a totally different place from the one we thought we were going to.

Sometimes you aim one place and shoot yourself in the foot--General Motors' bosses tried to intimidate Ralph Nader and turned him into the conscience of the nation instead (making themselves look like schmucks in the process). Newt Gingrich gleefully seized on Monica Lewinsky as a weapon against Bill Clinton and found his own career ruined. You know the Don Marquis line about a man so unfortunate that he ran into accidents that started out to happen to somebody else?

We all do. When an enraged man with an assault weapon entered a Long Island railroad car and started shooting, a congressman who wasn't there for the occasion was an incidental victim. The gunman killed Carolyn McCarthy's husband, and gravely injured her son. When she began to ask loudly and publicly why this insane man had been allowed to buy a gun, her representative gave the standard NRA line about her husband and son being gallant sacrifices in the name of protecting our second amendment liberties. So she ran against him on a gun control platform and won.

So many accidents have sent me caroming off at entirely different angles from my original plans. I went off to college to become a diplomat (nobody having mentioned to me that one of the basic job requirements is being, er, diplomatic), but a great professor turned me into an English major, and then I got run over by a book. Henry Steele Commager's American Minds showed me how art and literature reflected the society it came out of. This led me to the University of Iowa, to get a graduate degree in American studies. I had never really hung out with musicians before, but my roommate was a harpist who used to cry on the shoulder of a nice young Ph.D student in composition--the musician I ended up marrying. When my degree in American civilization led me nowhere I wanted to go, another accident sent me into librarianship.

My son was no accident, but out of all our possible gene combinations, he got double doses of the ones for humor, weirdness and music . You know, child-raising is not a one-way process--children have a way of raising you back. Had I had a dolls-and-teaparties little girl, or even a more ordinary little boy, I suspect I would have remained a conventional middle class woman. But when I taught this particular boy wordplay, he saw me and raised me one. When I taught him my music, he demanded that I learn his. He tripled my laidbackness quotient by making me laugh and lighten up when I was too rigid and furious.

Being on the internet was never part of my plan, either, nor was it for any of us over 30. My ending up there was just another accident of time and place--since the net was full of good information, my job required me to find it and share it. Starting this column was an accident as well--I just happened to be looking for new web sites on the day when the London Mall magazine announced it was looking for an American correspondent.

The invention of search engines has led to people finding each other on the net in totally unexpected ways. I wrote a column about weird names of rock groups (a column I could not have written were it not for my son's insistence that I learn his music). The column began with the line "As a fiftyish lady, I feel a little embarrassed to admit that I like Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine." A young man who was searching for stuff on his favorite band, Carter USM, found this column, read it, and stuck around to read some more. He just happened to be an editor at Fox.

So you see how it came to pass that I didn't become Secretary of State after all. Since I've always liked flowers better than asphalt, I kept getting off the straight career highway to explore the scenic byways.

But it's not just me. The same thing happened to almost everybody I know--we all got diverted. My dad studied architecture in Virginia but became a city planner instead because of an internship with the planning office in Cincinnati (where he met and married my mother). My brother Gordon got a doctorate in city planning but now does artificial intelligence research; my brother Walter, who trained to be an architect, ended up enforcing city housing codes. One of my readers landed a job with a top animation graphics company by saying interesting things in the right usenet group at the right time.

It's not that it doesn't make sense to try to plan a career and a life. But it also makes sense to pay attention to accidents, to see new possibilities in them, to allow yourself to be diverted from your five year plan. After all, the person who invented post-it notes was supposed to be inventing a better glue; his only-a-little-bit-sticky glue was a failure. He just understood that sometimes, failure is a switching point on those straight, narrow tracks you're riding. You can keep right on going, like Edison, who found several hundred ways light bulbs would NOT work before he found how they could. You can just get off. Or you can turn your engine and head in any direction you want.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.