Embracing the Random

RIP, Barbara, on the left

One of my favorite actors, Sydney Poitier, once observed that much of life is determined by pure randomness.

About a decade ago I noticed a change in the way English-speaking people use the word "random." I'd always adhered to its primary meaning: a haphazard course, without definite aim, direction, rule or method. If you don't shy away from profanity or indelicacy, you can check out Urban Dictionary to see how "random" has morphed to mean something else.

Here's a printable extract from that source:  Supposedly meaning spontaneous and off the wall by ignorant people.

Wiktionary includes this, as well: An undefined, unknown or unimportant person; a person of no consequence. [from 20^thc.] I don't think I like this dismissive meaning. The party was boring. It was full of randoms. So far as I'm concerned, we're all persons of consequence, subject to the random interventions of fate.

My thoughts this week already had been preoccupied with how much of our lives end up being determined by random events or choices.

Some examples: I started watching Call the Midwife when it first debuted a few years ago on KOCE, my local TV station. This past Sunday, one of the heroines, Barbara, died, suddenly and unexpectedly...she'd just been married a few episodes back. For the second time that day I bawled my eyes out. I went to bed distraught, smacked in the face with how the lives of any of us could end in similar ways. Random ways.

When I lived in Belize, I knew of a man who had been sitting by his open window and had been struck by a lightning bolt.
In one of the remote Dominican Republic rural villages I regularly visited, I knew a woman whose boyfriend, when she was still a teen, had been rounded up and murdered by Rafael Trujillo's henchmen, because the dictator, on one of his tours of the countryside, had spotted her and wanted her for himself.

This morning, driving home from Orange on the Garden Grove Freeway, I spotted an array of women's clothing cluttering the two left lanes. For several hundred yards I passed skirts and dresses, sweaters and blouses, panties, bras, and socks. When I'd approached the first item, black bikini underpants, I wondered if somebody had simply tossed it out the window as a prank. But then as I progressed, I saw dozens and dozens more pieces of clothing dotting the freeway, like ice cream sundae sprinkles.

I realized a fairly substantial suitcase or box must have flown from the rear of a pickup truck. I imagined that the vehicle had been taking a woman to a place where she could start her life anew. Perhaps she had a new job and was moving to a new apartment closer to work. Or maybe she'd been  traveling through Orange County only on an extended vacation trip. Still, the size of the lost wardrobe dumbfounded me. I wondered if she'd lost everything but the clothes on her back.

I tried to picture other, less dire, circumstances. Perhaps somebody simply was transporting a load of no-longer-wanted clothes to a charity shop...Habitat or Goodwill. Even so, though, customers of such shops now would be deprived of additional choices. Through some random oversight, a suitcase or a box hadn't been sufficiently secured.

All this afternoon I've reflected on how this loss might affect the owner of that collection of clothes.

Random circumstances.

More random events of this week. This past Sunday my beau, Frank, and I went to a CalJas house jazz concert for a tribute to the George Shearing Quintet. During the late afternoon
Becky Gonzales-Hughes sang two of my favorite songs. These two were standards that my sister,

Patti, used to sing...and hearing them again brought tears to my eyes: "The Nearness of You" and "Green Dolphin Street." I teared up, remembering my sister when she was a high school sophomore, and how I loved to hear her sing.
Later that evening, I listed to Nancy Wilson sing the two songs, and bawled some more. Then I watched "Call the Midwife," and cried in its aftermath until my eyes were swollen. I hadn't cried in months. Random. Melancholy reactions to random events.
 
 Here's Nancy Wilson singing those two songs with the George Shearing Quintet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaTYNNXvhg

Tonight I'm going to the dress rehearsal of the Westminster Community Playhouse production of "You Can't Take it With You." That Moss Hart/George Kaufman play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the year I was born, 1937. How random is that?

The family in that play, the Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichael clan, seemed able to accept, even embrace, the random...from snakes to taxes to fireworks. Maybe it's the perfect play for me to see while I'm still distracted by fretting over those lavender skirts and sweaters being mashed on the freeway.