I would like to say that I am a brave, adventurous person. But if I did, this would be a work of fiction. In truth, I have always had a love-hate relationship with adventure. My ambivalence goes back to my earliest memory. Actually, it’s not a memory at all, just fondly recounted family lore. It concerns how I took my first steps, holding onto a recording of Artur Rubenstein performing Chopin nocturnes. Apparently, the feel of something solid in my hands offered me just enough illusion of security that I was able to stand and walk. Briefly. It took only two wobbly steps for me to realize the nasty trick that record was playing on me. I was holding it up, not vice versa. Lucky for me that when I pitched forward I had the presence of mind to fling the record out of harm’s way. Otherwise I would have shattered it in the fall—not to mention deprived my mother, a gifted pianist, of a favorite recording. But when I fell and didn’t break the record, my mother and her friends all applauded. And I didn’t cry. I beamed. In that instant I learned a brief but powerful lesson: that imagination could take me further than common sense.
For every positive there’s a negative, though. Ever since that record’s betrayal I’ve tended to imagine the worst. Always, always, I’m accompanied by worries. If I’m swimming near shore where it’s shallow enough for my feet to touch the bottom, I see myself pummeled by a wave, drowning with my mouth full of salt water and sand. The presence of snow conjures images of an avalanche, and I feel the agonizing claustrophobia of an icy coffin with my arms pinned by snow set as hard as concrete, gasping as I suffocate. My progress through life has been a bizarre cha cha cha, as my desire to experience everything pulls me forward, while my nameless dreads yank me back.
I have another memory from my childhood. In it I’m lying on the TV room couch under a white comforter printed with sprays of pale pink and green flowers. This was the sick-day comforter, the one I was allowed to snuggle under as I watched daytime shows when home from elementary school with a sore throat or the flu. If I wasn’t so sick that I was confined to bed, I’d establish a beach head on that couch and watch TV all day. I’d start with the strange calisthenics of Jack LaLanne, followed by the shrill silliness of I Love Lucy and the drunken cooking instruction of The Galloping Gourmet, who slurped slivovitz while handling sharp knives. After an appropriately soothing lunch of chicken soup with rice I’d return to the couch with my glass of ginger ale for the best show of all: Let’s Make A Deal. I found Monty Hall’s ritual for choosing contestants fascinating and humiliating. I knew that, even were I old enough to attend a Let’s Make A Deal taping, I would not have had a purse large enough to carry the variety of items Monty might ask for, let alone the foresight to store a pair of underwear, a spatula, fifteen keys, and a hardboiled egg in it on the off-chance he’d request them. But once he yelled his trademark, “Come on dooowwwwn,” to the overjoyed contestant, I was all in, rooting “Pick door number one. No, no, no. Stop. Take door number two!”
Let’s Make A Deal made a peculiarly lasting impression on me. Which is why, as I do my awkward dance with worry, I’m also on the lookout for an opening, a possibility, a door that may be cracked just a fraction, enough for me to stick a toe through and push it open so I can see what’s on the other side. This is the story of one such door and what occurred when I blindly decided to step through. Had you been in my shoes, I suspect it’s a journey you could have accomplished as well as I did. Probably even better.