I glance at a paperback, which looks like I bought it a thousand years ago, ( I DID!) yet the copyright is merely 1970. It is Joyce Carol Oates, The Wheel of Love and in the story of the same name, there’s an idea that has stayed with me for all these many years– “…if you woke up one morning and ran outside and ran away from your life, wouldn’t you come into a new one? What would it be? And if you had run away a day earlier, wouldn’t you have gone to a different life still, a different world? When people know this, how can they stay in one place?” I thought about this a lot recently as David and I drove around Israel, seeing the changes, the new, while I searched for the old, the images I have keep frozen in my mind from so many years ago. It was a different life then. It would have been a different life for me had I stayed. I wonder about that other life, what paths I would have scrambled over , what people I would have met. I am grateful for the life of creativity and love I am lucky enough to have now- but I am also grateful for that other life, the one that is now so far away in time and space, the one that was the dusty road leading me to today.
