Wouldn’t you like to know?

Dear Stephanie,

Last night at work, one of the dishwashers brings out a tray of clean glasses for me, just like he does every night, and just like every night, he hands them to me across the bar. But this time, as I pull the tray toward me, it grazes the glass toothpick holder, which was right over the ice bin that holds the house white wines. The toothpick holder then falls into the ice bin directly onto a bottle of Pinot Grigio and shatters into approximately 12,743 itty bitty, teeny tiny razor sharp shards. Clearly, the toothpick holder was not made of tempered glass.

The weird part is that maybe an hour later, I put my hand in my back pocket, for no particular reason, and I felt a sharp prick. I could feel the glass pierce the tip of my right middle finger, could feel it settle deep into the layers of fingertip skin. How many layers exactly, I couldn’t tell you.

I had all these grand plans for today. For starters, I was going to wake up early and write for a minimum of three hours. Instead, I woke up super early to call the doctor, then spent the ensuing hours anticipating (with trepidation) seeing the doctor. It really fucked with my concentration.

Did you know that, according to my general practitioner, your finger pads are the most sensitive part of your body?

“People think it’s other parts (chuckle chuckle),” he tells me as he’s contemplating which scalpel he will use to slice open my cut, just a little, so he can get to that pesky little atom-sized piece of glass. “But believe it or not, it’s your fingertips. They have the most nerve endings.”

Isn’t that gratifying to know?

The whole episode raised some interesting questions for me, which I will share with you:

Who’s the brain trust who thought to put the toothpick holder right over the ice bin?

What if I’d just gone ahead and moved the toothpick holder when I first noticed that it was in the wrong spot? Sure, I took note that it was in the wrong spot, and I even thought about moving it, but then I just moved on to something else.

Come to think of it, why didn’t I move it?

Well, I mean, we have glass over the ice bins all the time. I’ve even seen servers or other bartenders scoop ice using glasses, which is actually illegal. I myself never do this, partly because it’s illegal and partly because I know myself too well: if anyone would screw up this sort of operation, you can be sure that it would be me. And I make enough other mistakes that I’m not in a position to prevent. So I choose to prevent the preventable, if you know what I mean.

So it’s nagging the hell out of me that I didn’t just move the damn thing.

But also: How did that one tiny shard of glass find its way into my back pocket? I mean, it’s really bizarre. It wasn’t even my front pocket, which would seem more reasonable.

In this case, it was hardly a big deal, in the grand scheme of thing, but it makes me think about how one tiny, perhaps even seemingly inconsequential, moment can have vast, far-reaching consequences. You can go over the chain of events that led to the moment (assuming you can even pinpoint which moment is the significant one), but you can’t go back and change those events to lead to a different outcome (assuming you can figure out which events you would need to change to lead to a different outcome).

Take, for example, my little boy’s accident a few years back. Remember? It was Easter Sunday, and he was playing outside with my dad, brother, and nephew. It had been raining, so he was wearing his big, clunky rain boots, and he tripped. He fell right towards the long metal bin, filled with smoldering coals, over which my dad had been roasting a lamb for about eight hours. My brother caught him, but not before my little boy’s hand grazed the side of the bin.

It was just a second, but when my brother carried him into the house, his skin was dripping down his arm.

So many “what ifs”:

What if it hadn’t been raining, and he wasn’t wearing those boots?

What if I hadn’t let him go outside near the coal bin?

What if I had been out there too?

What if, like I had wanted, I had blown off Easter dinner (it was pouring rain, my basement had flooded so we got a late start, I was tired)?

I could have been home watching Mr. Roger’s reruns and playing with legos with my little boy, but instead, I didn’t see my house again for a week, which I spent in the pediatric burn unit at New York Presbyterian sleeping on a little cot in his room.

“I wish this hadn’t happened, mommy,” he said to me the first morning we woke up in the hospital. “How are we even going to eat?”

“I wish this hadn’t happened, too, but don’t worry,” I assured him. “They’ll bring you food right to your room.”

“Oh?” he asked. “They have room service here?”

The social worker came to visit me that first day. I think she was supposed to be reassuring, but she just pissed me off.

“You have to be very, very careful around fire,” she said.

Oh my God! Seriously? Also, can you tell me: is they sky blue?! Just wondering!

You see, I’m well aware that Bad Things Can Happen. I never let this boy out of my sight except to send him to school or camp or to spend time with his dad or my mom. He never had a babysitter who wasn’t vetted ten ways til the end of time. Playdates? Sure, as long as I can stay. Driving in other people’s cars? Hell no! I’m one of the most over-protective mothers he knows (and believe me, he lets me know!). And here’s this social worker telling me I have to be more careful. That would require an actual bubble!

What that social worker failed to understand is that things happen—sometimes good, sometimes bad—that cannot be predicted or deconstructed.

And even when you have a fancy PhD from a brand-name university, you still can’t figure out why things happen the way that they do.

Love,

Stella