A near miss
I’ve been thinking about the expression “your number’s up” a lot this week. Basically, the expression refers to an unexpected death. When you say “well, I guess his number was up” what you are really saying is that it was his time to go. By necessity, that means that someone else or, more precisely, a God has drawn that number out of a hat. (Do Gods wear hats? I’ve never seen a likeness of a God wearing a fishing hat or a baseball hat.)
Another way of looking at the “your number’s up” expression is that it involves a statistic, a long shot number that quantifies a long shot death. Nobody says “well, I guess his number was up” about an old guy who died in his sleep of heart failure. No we reserve the expression for the really oddball deaths we read about in the news. The guy walking out to his mailbox who is struck and killed by a falling chunk of blue ice from an airplane passing by overhead. The newspaper account will tell you that your odds of getting hit by a chunk of frozen airplane debris is 1 in 200 million or some such number. There is a number attached to every bizarre death. Statisticians live for this stuff.
Equally interesting to me are the near misses. Whenever I hear one of those disturbing reports about a piece of elevated highway that comes loose and lands square on top of a car driving on the road below, my first thought is, “wow, I guess his number was up.” But then I start thinking about the guy driving the car just ahead of the guy that got flattened. Why wasn’t it him? There are no odds for near misses. You can’t attach a number to almost. The concrete slab misses you by an inch or it misses you by a mile, in either case it missed!
Strictly speaking, the odds that we will die in one of these off-the-wall, newsworthy deaths is pretty much the same for all of us. The twenty people on the golf course trying to squeeze in one more hole before the thunderstorm hits are equally likely to get hit by lightning. It’s pure statistics.
But statistics can’t tell the whole story. Luck is a variable that you won’t see in any statistical formula. I believe that some people are luckier than others. Need proof? Try to explain the people who have been hit by lightning more than once. What’s the world record? Six times? Something like that. That is one unlucky son of a bitch. Maybe he works outside for a living so his odds of getting hit are higher. But there are plenty of people who work outside a lot. Most of them have never been hit by lightning – not once.
So are you a lucky person or an unlucky person? Do you think about that when you are in an unsafe situation? Do you find yourself contemplating your luck when you’re driving on a narrow mountainous road without guard rails? Every mile or so on the road there is a little makeshift grotto with a cross and some plastic flowers designating the spot where someone who was unlucky went over the edge. But that won’t happen to you, right?
Last Sunday morning, my wife, Cynde, was in Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris when terminal 2E collapsed. She was just passing through on her way from Washington to St. Petersburg, Russia for a meeting. What are the odds of her being there at that exact moment? Pretty damn small. Conversely, the odds against her being there are astronomically large. She was in terminal 2F, the one right next to the terminal that collapsed, making the unlikely odds even higher. At this point we’re talking “your number’s up” odds.
I woke up Sunday morning and made my usual trek to the computer to check emails. I saw the headline about the collapse on the CNN website. I simply couldn’t believe it. Only a few people had died, according to CNN, but they weren’t sure of the numbers yet. I was fairly confident that she was safe, but you never know. For a short while that morning I found myself wondering, “are we lucky people or not?” I called Cynde’s hotel in Russia. It was difficult to communicate with the woman at the reception desk. Finally, she said that Cynde had not checked in. This was hours after she should have been there. Thankfully, I was forwarded to a hotel manager who confirmed that Cynde had indeed checked in. In fact, the manager said, she had just seen Cynde in the lobby a short while earlier. All was okay.
When Cynde called me back later in the day, she seemed surprised that I was trying to track her down. “What do you mean?” I said. “I called because of the terminal collapsing in Paris.” She was clueless. Despite her proximity, she didn’t see or hear the collapse (eyewitness accounts said it felt like an earthquake) and the French authorities didn’t tell her anything.
I hung up from that call relieved and thinking that we were lucky. At least this time. That’s the thing about luck. Eventually, it runs out. Hopefully, after you’ve lived a good long life. The last thing you want is for people to say your number is up. No today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. As I’m telling you this, I am knocking on wood.
10:52:50 PM  Stories
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