Postcard from a parallel universe

Perhaps it's because I'm on sabbatical this semester, and therefore paying more attention to the world around me than the stack of papers in front of me, but I'm really missing autumn. Perhaps it's because I was in Boise a few weeks ago (and at Ragdale a few weeks before that) and had a taste of real fall weather for the first time in a long time. In this part of Texas, we know fall has arrived when we need to put on a jacket for the first few hours of the early morning. Sometimes I wonder how in the world I wound up here, of all places

A friend of mine recently moved from Kansas City to an apartment in downtown Portland. She's loving her new life, including the change of climate, and I have to admit that I'm a little jealous. Portland is a great city, and I love the ethos of the Northwest in general--living in an apartment in the Pearl District sounds like a great life to me. There was a time when my husband and I were planning an urban life for ourelves, either in Portland or Seattle, but our plans never came to fruition. We wound up staying in Boise instead, and that turned out to be a great choice for us: we taught at BSU for several years, made some good friends, had a baby, reconnected with my family. I've never regretted that decision, but I've often wondered how our lives might have changed if we'd followed our original plan.

A few weeks ago, I watched a really interesting episode of Nova on PBS called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives." The premise behind it is pretty complex, but it hinges on the theory of parallel universes--the idea that every time we find ourselves at a point where a decision has to be made, there's a version of ourselves that lives out every possibility. We're only aware of one decision, of course, because we're only one version of ourselves.

So, in theory, there's a version of me that made that move to Portland (and probably a version of me in Seattle, too.) I wonder if the Portland/Seattle versions of me wound up going back to graduate school and earning their Ph.D's. My husband was happy with his full-time teaching position at BSU, but I'd hit the ceiling of my options and knew I couldn't spend the rest of my life as a part-time teacher of freshman composition. That just wasn't going to make me happy. The only way I could open up other options for myself was by getting a book published--a process over which I had only partial control--or by getting a Ph.D. So the Boise me chose to go back to graduate school.

But the Seattle/Portland versions of me might have made career shifts when they arrived in their new cities; those choices might have moved graduate school off the radar completely. Perhaps those versions of me found their way into careers that supported the lives they wanted to live, something I knew part-time college teaching in Boise would never do.

The interesting thing about the trajectory of your life is how it builds itself, how one decision leads to others you wouldn't have had to make in other circumstances. If we hadn't moved to Boise, I might never have thought about going back for my Ph.D.. If I hadn't asked Deborah Eisenberg for a letter of recommendation when I applied to graduate school, I might never have considered the program at Missouri--that was her suggestion. (Of course, there's a version of me that didn't make this decision, too. Who knows where she is now, or what she's doing.)

The long chain of choices that brought me to this particular moment in this particular version of my life probably couldn't be traced back very far, since it involves the smallest decisions along with the big ones--whether to drink a cup of coffee or make a trip to the grocery store, for example. And it's probably best not to think about the millions of versions of me that have met with untimely deaths because of the choices they made, however innocuous those choices might have seemed.

Instead, I'll focus on the small miracle of being where I am right now. It's not a perfect place, true, but it's a human place. The fact that I'm still here seems like reason enough to be happy.