the odds were certainly not in my favor (current odds are listed at 1.21 billion to 1!), but this didn't matter. i had dutifully signed and returned all of the pre-winner winner forms all but guaranteeing my victory, even though i wasn't legally of age to win. this also didn't matter- i had secretly been penning my father's name. i had studied his signature on the two examples i was able to scrounge:
- a waiver form for our 4th grade trip to the Science Museum of Minnesota
- a check he'd written for the trip then voided because he had to make the check out for twice the amount, as both my twin brother and i would be in attendance (my parents always did that- wrote only one check out for the both of us, forcing one of us into the uncomfortable position of explaining to our teacher that we had, indeed, paid for the trip, but they would have to believe that the money was with our twin brother, whose teacher would submit payment for both of us to the School Bank, wherever that might be located)
how sweet the surprise would be when publisher's clearing house arrived at our front door at the halftime show on superbowl sunday requesting the whereabouts of my completely unexpecting father. how delighted he would be. how terribly unexpected.
anyone who's anyone will remember that we did not, in fact, win the publishers clearing house superbowl sunday halftime million dollar giveaway in 1992. the award went, instead, to rita faithchild in montgomery, alabama (and hopefully toward a new full set of teeth for herself).
but fortune found me in a much more splendid way that sunday: i accurately predicted the outcome of the game, including not only who would win, but how many points each team would have: Redskins beat the Bills 37-24. i had made this prediction at school the friday before the big game (i was all but certain this would make me nothing less than a celebrity at edinbrook elementary come monday morning, or in the very least make up a monetary smidgen of my pch dreams. i was terribly mistaken). how terribly unexpected.
the unexpected happens all around us, every day in tiny, blink-or-you-miss-em sorts of ways. it's the occurrence of something happening to us that we didn't predict happening, but certainly wasn't out of the realm of possibility.
my (father's) winning publishers clearing house would have been unexpected (particularly to him, even at odds greater than a billion to one). my winning the superbowl prediction: quite unexpected, but certainly not beyond the scope of potentiality.
the inexpected is that which, in our minds, exists far beyond our neighborhood of chance. it's the opposite of expected. it's the wario to the expected's mario, the antimatter to possibility's matter. it's the richard simmons to chance's clint eastwood. it's captain chesley 'sully' sullenberger, the 1980 usa hockey team, 9/11.
living with the inexpected is next to impossible, because by its very nature, we can't even consider it bearing potential. but somewhere in the chaos of those inexpected moments, within the tumult, the cacophony of bedlam, at the very nucleus of it all is the exact spark of existence. its our unbridled, unforgiving, unimaginable essence of being. and while we can't anticipate it, while we won't realize it until long after, if we can remind ourselves in these most terrifying of moments that this is WHY we live, then maybe our inexpected present can move toward our most unexpected wonder, our greatest reminder of life.
