Heads I win, Tails....I Was Never Here.

I’m fifty years old. Big deal, right? A lot of people are, or have been, or will be fifty years old. But recently, I realized that if one little event 107 years ago had gone just a little bit differently, I would never have seen fifty, or forty, or 10, or anything. This little event that had such a great bearing on my life had the same bearing on my father’s life, my grandfather’s life, and my kids’ lives. So what was this little event? A coin toss. And the implications of that coin toss will go through my mind every time I am called on to make a decision by choosing between heads and tails while a coin goes flipping through the air.

As the story goes, My great Grandfather and his younger brother were middle-aged bachelors who lived next door to each other on family land in Saybrook Connecticut. Because they were confirmed bachelors, and thrifty New Englanders, they shared a cleaning woman. One day, the cleaning woman, whose name I should probably know but don’t, died unexpectedly. Now, she left behind the typical cleaning lady stuff, a feather duster, a bucket of soapy water, and an 18 year old daughter. My great grandfather and his brother, being concerned gentlemen, decided that the right thing to do would be to honor the memory of their cleaning woman by marrying her daughter, thereby caring for her.

The question of who would actually marry her was best settled, they decided, by the flip of a coin. Now I don’t know if it was a single flip or best two out of three, but the result was that my great grandfather married the young woman who, one would hope, had some sort of say in the matter. The reason I say that I should probably know the name of the dead cleaning woman is because she was my great-great grandmother.

So, in 1890 at the age of fifty, my great grand father was well on his way to being the last of his line, the last of my line. If that coin had taken one half spin more or less, my grandfather, father, me, and my kids, along with aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., would never have existed. Any effect or influence that we have had, good or bad, would have been lost. There is something a bit humbling about knowing that your very existence was dependent on the way a man called a coin toss 107 years ago… I’m sure glad he lost!