Life’s a Crapshoot

Did you watch it? The storybook Royal Wedding? What did you take from it? That there’s no predicting life. No one would have thought a Hollywood starlet would marry an honest-to-goodness prince. Well, not in real life. In stories. In movies. On TV. But not for real. But it was. Real.

Rolling the Dice

Back in 2006, I was becoming increasingly aware of egg donors facilities. Yes. I was pretty amazed that people were picking characteristics they wanted for their children and were buying eggs that they thought would make little people with those traits. What’s cool is that it doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. Thank goodness. For instance, neither of our children plays the piano by ear, but I do. On the other hand, I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag, but our younger son is crazy-good at drawing, painting, sketching, shading, faces (for gosh sakes), and composition. How nice a surprise. Right? 

Is life a game of chance? I think it is deliciously so. In fact, I say throw all the eggs and sperm in a piñata and do a free-for-all blindfolded party burst. Then grab the gametes and zygotes that lie on the ground, smash them together and you’ll have a kid — any old kid, and the future means nothing, the past means nothing, and lineage has no meaning whatsoever. Birthrights mean doodly squat. The Kennedy clan has had more than its share of problems, right? 

You can be born and given up for adoption. You can be born into squalor. You can come into the world with an affliction. You can start your life in a palace. And sometimes that, too, can be bad luck! What. Dee. Heck?

People that are born of two parents bring recessive and dominant genes to the party. The randomness of the different permutations produces hugely disparate kids of the same two parents, no matter how many kids they have. It’s the scary-wonderful, elegant and inelegant magic of it all. We keep doing it through the centuries, and sometimes we make a mess of it, and sometimes, it’s a beautiful thing, this life.

Life’s a crapshoot right from the beginning, and that’s all there is to it. There should be more, somehow, but there isn’t.