Memories: Revisiting a View

There are experiences in life that teach us lessons. Sometimes they are painful, sometimes they're blessings, sometimes they are both.

Four years ago around this time I had one of those experiences when I sheared the lateral condyle off my left femur.

Over the past four years, though, every time we've, or just myself, walked down 3rd Street, where we live, I've been able to look down Linden and see off in the distance, at least half the time, one of the great ocean cruise ships out in the water beyond where the street ends:

That is the exact view I was going to take some pictures of the day I broke my femur. I know this picture is blurry...I took it earlier today just to prove my point to myself.

And I've been able to revisit it on a nearly constant basis.

I have made my share of mistakes, and had my share of painful experiences, but rarely do I confront them on a nearly constant basis. Actually never. I'm better at reflecting now than I was before, the busted femur un-involved in that evolution, and I've tried to examine the mistakes I've made and learn from them in a mature fashion.

And I do believe that seeing this same view, virtually fifteen to twenty times a month in the four years since the accident, has helped hammer home the foundation of a belief system that was in place far before the accident: the randomness and absurdity of tiny decisions and events in the face of an indifferent universe.

And then the scroll of time brings me back to that summer, where by now I was spending each day laid up on the couch, wearing one of Corrie's Thai drawstring-skirts and watching Ken Burns specials on Netflix. If you were abut to start high school that summer, about to be a 9th grader, then by now you'd have just graduated (if all went according to plan).

Of course the four years from ages 33 to 37 are far different than the years aged 14 to 18.

The later ages made me experienced enough to be equipped for the confrontations with a decision---let's go get a closer look and some pics---and the ramifications of the randomness and indifference of our universe.