Being thankful you were a fool

I had a short story idea this morning. Though it gripped me more than just that.

I’m thinking some magicians/scientists experiment with a guy and throw him back in time to the early nineties. So he suddenly gets to deal with all the things he did wrong in his life. The main thing he does is work really hard making money and making connections. It helps that he has a vague idea to invest in AOL and Amazon and Google and oil and when to pull out. But the main issue is that he really keeps his eye on getting ahead. Rather than writing for “religious right” publications as much, he really leveraged everything he had to write for businesses.

So he really gets ahead with his wife, since he was thrown back to about the time he got married. Things seem very ideal to him. He moves to Nashville, right on schedule, but is able to actually buy a house, something that had never happened the first time around. His wife seem a lot less stressed than he remembered. Everything is working out.

And then his wife gets pregnant. How did that happen? Before, it took them two years to conceive, and they did so after leaving Nashville. So who is this child going to be? And it turns out to be a girl, whereas before his firstborn was a boy. His wife and he discuss names and all the ones he always wanted for a daughter, ones she expected him to use, he refuses. He knows a girl who will be born who should get those names and then another after for the third favorite candidate.

Or will she? Suddenly it becomes obvious that his ideal life is not one he can share with the actual children he knew and loved and was hoping to do better for. They are gone, annihilated, never existed. They never will. He gets new children now. Wonderful happy and much better supported children. And he has trouble looking at them some times. He wants the four he had before.

And something else starts to break apart. His wife starts complaining because he’s not the man she married. She married an idealist and, once his weird explanations for his sudden change in pursuits wear out, she feels like he is someone else. He doesn’t handle this well at all. He tells her she doesn’t know what she wants or how miserable she would be. Of course, he is the one that is miserable now.

What would I call this story? “Same Stream Twice” has a ring to it. “Wishing I Could be Stupid Again” might work. “Preferring Potterville” might work if “It’s a wonderful life” is still remembered. Some reference to Zuzu’s petals should be included.

My sons talk to me about how great the world would be if Adam never sinned. But I point out to them that they would never see it. That other timeline would have other people in it.

And it even works to an extent in an individual’s autobiography. You can’t help but have regrets. But ultimately it is impossible to hate your life decisions without hating yourself and the person you have become.  A different life would mean different relationships and ultimately a different self. And there is no point in hating yourself. That never works. Wanting to improve yourself and avoid repeating past mistakes presupposes just the opposite.

6 thoughts on “Being thankful you were a fool

  1. Kathy

    I think you should write it. Of couse, it’s been done before–one iteration is the Nicolas Cage movie “Family Man.” But your synopsis is gripping, and tying it in with Adam and our dreams of paradise-never-lost gives it a poignant twist.

    On that note, I sometimes think our notions of heaven are misguided in the same way. We don’t quite understanad what we’re hoping for.

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  2. mark Post author

    Right. But Family Man and It’s A Wonderful Life both make one life better by some kind of objective criteria. I’m saying the lost relationships make the alternative unbearable. George would love Pottersville if that were the original (leaving out it was premised onhis never being born).

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  3. Jim Irwin

    Since the existence of a human being is foreordained, it may be that at the moment the original children were conceived is the moment that you find yourself with the opportunity to conceive at the same time–but you may have more children in the alternative life–or the children are conceived at the same time as the original children but then meet with untimely deaths or accidents.!?

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  4. pentamom

    That’s really what grace in a fallen world is all about, isn’t it? We mess up, but God intends us to live in a world where we mess up, are forgiven, and then the results of our mess-ups are either sanctified or alleviated.

    I often think of the immature way I went about seeking for and finding a husband and entering into marriage. Had I done everything “right,” (the way I’d like to see my own children do it) I might well not be married to this wonderful man for 20 years, with five great kids and a whole host of other blessings. I’d have other ones, no doubt, but I can’t imagine relinquishing these. But what I intended for stupidity, God intended for good.

    So in a way, it’s the anti-George Bailey. George’s life was proved to be worth living because he’d lived it well in spite of it not being his ideal. Our lives are worth living because God is good, even when we don’t live them as well as George.

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