by Amy Newmark
But . . . the contraband music tugged at me as the years went by.
When I was ten years old, my parents gave me a portable record player for Christmas, with the caveat that I could only play “appropriate” music. I wasn’t sure what the boundaries of secular/non-secular were, but I managed to sneak some Donny Osmond onto my Philips portable. He was a nice, God-loving boy, I explained to my parents, even if he wasn’t Southern Baptist. They allowed it.
In the early Seventies, as I was entering my teen years, I discovered the creamy, dreamy voice of Karen Carpenter. I played and sang her mellow ballads at home on the piano, and my parents didn’t protest. She was a good girl, not one of those wild, unwashed, hippie types who had taken over and sang about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Then, in seventh grade, the overprotective wall my parents so carefully constructed was blasted to bits. My music teacher in school announced we were to study The Who’s rock opera Tommy in class. She carefully lowered the turntable needle onto the song “Acid Queen,” and my virgin ears and senses exploded. What was this?
I decided not to tell my parents about my introduction to Roger Daltrey—I wanted to listen to more. After The Who, there were others. And through my music teacher and my own exploration, I learned there was artistry, beauty and yes—even God, in many types of music. And that a rollicking rock tune or a toe-tapping musical theatre number could be noble in their own way because they expressed and shared the human experience.
One afternoon, around the time of my revelations, I thought I was alone in the house. I went to the piano and dusted off one of my beloved show tunes and began to play. I pounded the keys and sang with gusto, throwing myself into the music with abandon. I hadn’t sung at home like that since my My Fair Lady gig. I was exhilarated, transported . . .
. . . until I heard my father’s footsteps coming up the stairs, heading straight for me.
“Who,” he asked, “do you think you are?”
I froze. I’m not sure of his exact words or intent, but I remember how I felt: ashamed. For months after that, I was heartsick and didn’t play and sing like that again—as if a part of me had died.
Then one morning, I woke up earlier than usual. The dawn was peeking through my bedroom curtains and the house was quiet. That’s when I heard a voice, The voice—not in my head, but out loud in my room. It was deep, authoritative, and unmistakable: You are here to sing.
I sat up in bed and looked around; no one else was in the room. I pinched myself; I wasn’t asleep and dreaming. I knew who that voice was, I just knew. God spoke to me that day and firmly set me back on my path toward a destiny I knew to be mine since I was a child.
I was meant to sing, He said.
I was meant to sing out loud, unashamed, and sing songs that had meaning to me and brought people together. From that day onward, I never doubted my choice in music again.
God’s words and the faith that I had in them led me to the Met stage that night, and into Plácido’s arms for his enchanted kiss.
I never heard God’s voice again. But forty years later, it’s like I heard it only yesterday.
~Deborah Voigt with Natasha Stoynoff
All the Luck I Need
Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don’t depend on it.
~Author Unknown
It’s not a story I’ve told before, not even to many members of my family, but I think about it every anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. It’s a story about good timing and plain dumb luck, and how a single seemingly irrational decision can change your life.
A number of years ago my day job was with a software company. It was a great little company. Nice people, fun work. Everyone worked hard to get us on the map. The technical people were very bright. Not being that bright myself, I looked after sales.
We went to all the trade shows and managed to have more fun than most other people there. And none of it involved booze, flirting or staying out past ten o’clock. We just loved what we were doing.
Then one day a new customer appeared—at the time one of the biggest software companies in the world. They liked what we were doing so much they wanted to buy the company, even though it wasn’t for sale. Eventually they made an offer that no one could refuse (this was before the dot-com technology bubble broke, and people were paying stupid amounts of money for software companies), and in the beginning of 2001 they arranged to buy the company.
As luck would have it, since we were such a small company, there were only two of us in sales — the president and me. The president decided early on that he would be leaving his newly sold company with a sack of cash in pursuit of fresh challenges. That left me.
The new owners decided they needed someone to run the new operation, and offered the job to me. To go with the job, they were going to make me their newest vice president. The position came with a bigger salary than I may ever see again, stock options and the works.
The new owners all talked about their private airplanes and personal helicopters, or the multimillion-dollar homes they were building for their very early retirement. There were weeklong seminars in Tuscany and Paris, and bonuses that were bigger than what most people paid for their houses. They even announced before I had said yes that I was their new vice president.
I hemmed and hawed for a while. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay on without my friend, but it isn’t every day you walk away from a job as vice president of the fourth largest software company in the world.
Still, that’s what I did.
It sounds stupid now, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. I vaguely thought the job wouldn’t be much fun, and the people I would have been working for seemed a little too sharp for their own good. Eventually I’d likely have to move to California, which is nice but isn’t home.
My friend the former president said I was welcome to join him in his new venture. So with a leap of faith, I said so long to the giant golden carrot dangling before me and instead went with my friend to pursue an uncertain future.
About six months later I watched the unimaginable as the World Trade Center crumbled to dust with so many people inside.
When the dead were finally given names, I realized that one of them was the new senior person in the office where I had worked. He had been offered my job after I left. He had been on a company seminar in the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, and managed a brief cell phone call to a loved one before he died.
Would that have been me? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not. It’s not something I really want to think about too much, especially since he had taken the job that I turned down.
As for me, on 9/11 I know exactly where I was. After watching that horrible morning unfold on TV, my wife and I kept a noon appointment for an ultrasound, where I saw my unborn first son curled up and oblivious to the terrible things that were going on in the outside world.
I’m not a big believer in fate or miracles, but I have never underestimated the power of luck. And if that’s the last bit of good luck I ever have in my life, you won’t hear me complain.
~Stephen Lautens
The Lucky Strike
It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.
~Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
Things were looking really good. My father, Jeff, was on a mini-break of sorts, enjoying the back end of his two weeks of freedom between old and new jobs. My mother’s lupus had gone into remission the previous year and she had successfully shaken off all of the heavy-duty prescriptions that had kept her groggy but afloat during her years-long flare-up. Now she had tons of newfound energy and was putting it into opening her own business, a gift shop and café, something she had always dreamed of doing.
The business had been open for two weeks, and it was already slowly but surely building up a small, loyal customer base. Even with most things up and running there were always a hundred more little projects to do to get the building fitted out as m
y mother had planned. Being a handy kind of guy to have around, Dad was always running to The Home Depot down the hill from their house, picking up tools and lumber, bathroom and light fixtures, plumbing and electrical components . . . . You name a job and he was on top of it, flexing his constructive muscles and getting things done.
On this particular day, he just needed to make one quick stop at the store before heading over to the café. He packed his purchases away in the trunk of his relatively small SUV, buckled up and made his way across the parking lot toward the street. There was a traffic light set up to make sure no one had to take any chances trying to turn out onto Lancaster Avenue, one of the busier streets in an area crisscrossed by busy streets. The light was red when my father pulled up, the first in line to leave the lot.
The thing about my dad is that he has always been a very patient, very cautious driver. He never runs yellow lights or switches lanes on the highway unless there’s a really good reason. He always signals his intention to turn and never gets stressed out by heavy traffic. And he certainly never gets mad when some less-conscientious driver cuts him off. Not even a grumble. A wavy, almost cartoonish “whoa!” is just about all you’ll get out of him after one of those close shaves. He’s just not the type.
Dad was watching for the signal to turn green, not creeping up like so many of us do, myself included, but waiting patiently as ever. When the light changed, he made his way into the intersection to make the left turn that would take him to my mother and his latest café project. But there’s this saying, you may know it: “Man plans and God laughs.” My dad didn’t make it to the café that day.
The woman in the minivan had just about had enough of the three rowdy little boys in her back seat. They had been carrying on the whole ride, and after a while she didn’t want to hear any more of their monkey business. The light had been green when she turned around to scold them. She must have just missed it turning yellow in the near distance.
The force of the impact on my father’s side of the car was so strong that it flipped the whole vehicle over, rolling it two and a half times before it finally settled on its side. The driver’s side.
When the EMTs arrived my dad was already trying to work his way out through the car’s shattered sunroof. He had already done a quick assessment of all his limbs, making sure nothing was broken. The EMTs helped him the rest of the way out, marveling over the complete absence of any injuries more significant than the few small scrapes he had gotten from some broken and airborne glass. The air bags hadn’t even inflated, making the whole situation that much more impressive, his intactness that much more mind-boggling.
“I didn’t want to go to the hospital because I felt fine, but I could just hear your mother’s voice in the back of my head yelling at me. ‘Don’t be stupid; go get checked out. I don’t want you taking any chances.’ ”
The EMTs took my dad to the local hospital. Pretty soon my mother arrived on the scene.
My mother Judy is a lady you don’t want to mess with, not when it comes to protecting her family. She also ran a medical clinic for several years, so not only does she know a lot about health and health care, she’s also perfectly comfortable questioning doctors on their own turf. And she will question them like nobody’s business.
“They said everything was fine, but I told them he needed to get at least a chest X-ray. They didn’t think it was necessary, but I told them we weren’t leaving until they did it.” She also persuaded them to give him a CAT scan to make sure everything in his head looked like it should, which it did.
When the X-ray films came back, my mother knew immediately that something was wrong. She quickly dialed her close friend, a seasoned physician she calls Dr. Bob, and told him what she thought. He was out the door and on his way in mere minutes.
What the X-rays showed—and what we would learn much more about in the coming weeks—was the grapefruit-sized tumor that had been growing unnoticed in my father’s chest. After a battery of tests, and appointments with the oncology specialists at the only hospital in the country really familiar with this particular thing, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, the doctors explained to us that my father had a fairly rare form of cancer called a thymoma.
The thymus gland sits just under the sternum, nestled between the two hemispheres of the lungs and on top of several major blood vessels that attach to the heart, like the pulmonary artery and the ascending aorta. It’s a pretty sensitive and important area.
My father’s thymoma had apparently been growing for some time, but he hadn’t noticed a thing. He played golf and tennis regularly. He had even played on the company softball team, keeping up with the rest of the group despite being the oldest player by a good couple of decades. By all appearances, he was healthy as could be.
What we learned next was that this tumor was discovered at a particularly critical stage. It had already encroached on his pericardium, the thin membrane that surrounds and protects the heart. A few more months of growth and the tumor probably would have put out tentacles, growing into the cardiac tissue or metastasizing into other organs. A few more months and it would have started pressing on those blood vessels, in all likelihood causing a stroke, if not worse. A few more months and it would have been too late to save him.
But it never got those months.
My father was treated with chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, and when it did shrink enough the surgeons cut the malignant thing out of his chest.
That was five years ago and my dad is still cancer-free. His hair grew back a little grayer and coarser, and he naps a little more often than he used to, but he’s back on the golf course, back to walking the dogs around the track at the nearby park until they’re ready to drop, back to gardening and fixing things around the house. He and my mother, despite all of the scares they’ve had, they laugh a lot.
You never know what weird ways opportunity will find to present itself. It isn’t always as dramatic as a car accident, but it somehow finds a way to get your attention.
If it weren’t for that crash, my father would be gone by now. It was the happiest accident, the luckiest strike I have ever seen.
~Marti Davidson Sichel
One Sunny Afternoon
All God’s angels come to us disguised.
~James Russell Lowell
I pressed my foot firmly on the gas pedal, wondering how much over the speed limit it would be safe to travel. After months of looking for a full-time position, I’d finally gotten an interview. The job wasn’t what I wanted, but as a new college graduate I couldn’t afford to be choosy. Perspiration dotted my forehead. With only fifteen minutes until the interview and twenty minutes of driving to go, I said a quick prayer before glancing down to turn up the air conditioner. When I looked up again, I saw him.
A medium-sized brown dog had scampered into the road and stood right in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes. The seatbelt squeezed into my stomach as the momentum threw me forward, but my car screeched to a stop just in time. The dog darted back to the side of the road. His fur looked matted and dirty. A broken chain dragged along behind him. A runaway, I thought, and lifted my foot from the brake to let the car coast. The dog continued to walk near the side of the road with his head down, sniffing at every step.
I sighed and steered my car to the shoulder. Someone in a red car honked and whizzed by, apparently in as much of a hurry as I was. But no matter how much I wanted to keep going, I couldn’t bring myself to ignore the dog’s plight. His chain could get caught in bushes or he might make another dash into the road. If I didn’t help him, who else would? I opened the car door and stepped out on rocks that scratched my new tan pumps.
“Here, boy. Come here,” I called out as sweetly as I could.
The dog stopped and looked at me with his ears lifted and his head cocked to one side. I held out my hand, wishing for a tempting treat to offer him as I inched closer. He stood still until I reached out to grab him. Then he cut away from me, past a sma
ll scraggly bush toward the expansive acres of an open field. There, he began to scamper in circles as though encouraging me to come after him.
Great. The dog seemed to think my presence meant it was time for a game of chase. I gritted my teeth and tried to keep an eye on him while picking my way over stones scattered helter-skelter on the ground.
The afternoon sun burned my face and sweat trickled down my back. The dog didn’t seem to mind the heat and continued what he thought was a game, always staying about ten feet away from me. His tail swished and I could see the sparkle in his eyes. I clenched my jaw and kept moving forward until something caught my leg. A thorny bush had snagged the fabric of my pants and held it tight.
I bent down and carefully pulled the cloth away from the thorns. It left a small, gaping hole. Muttering at my luck, I gritted my teeth and stood. I frowned and scanned the field. The dog had disappeared. I called and whistled. Nothing. The entire area was flat with no trees or large bushes to hide behind. I could see for what seemed like miles. But somehow, chain and all, the dog had vanished like a desert mirage. Finally I shook my head and trudged back to the car.
If I couldn’t help a dog, at least I could try to salvage a potential job. I nosed the car back into the road and tried to convince myself the interviewer would understand when I explained what happened. Thoughts of the stray dog shamed me into slowing down as I headed toward a hairpin curve not far from where my improbable pursuit had begun. As soon as my car rounded the curve, I saw brake lights and a line of cars. I hit the brakes and screeched to a stop. There’d been an accident. A car was wedged under the side of a dump truck. It appeared the truck had stopped in the road to empty a load of gravel. The car’s hood looked like a crushed aluminum can. My eyes widened when I recognized it as the same red car that roared past me only a short while earlier.