Opinions

The incidents that broaden our worldview — sometimes in unexpected ways

Most of us become uncomfortable thinking about the role of chance in our lives. We prefer to believe, “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul,” in the words of a popular poem of yesteryear, “Invictus.”

We concede chance reluctantly, noting the obvious — who our parents are, where we were born. Perhaps, also, we can point to some chance event that changed our life’s trajectory. In my case, the chance event involved a power pole.

In 1950, when I turned six, my parents moved from the trapline to Fairbanks so my younger sister Kathleen and I could attend school. My dad, Fabian, bought a house in the suburb of Graehl, north of the Chena River. A Fairbanks suburb should not bring to mind Levittown, the prototypical planned ‘burb of the 1950s. Graehl was log cabins, sprawling frame houses and tar-paper shacks. Our house on Front Street was heated by oil, not wood like our trapline cabin, and every couple of months, the fuel delivery truck would back into the yard and fill the drums next to the house with heating oil.

In October of 1952, a little more than two years after we moved in, the fuel delivery driver backed into the yard, probably at too much speed, certainly carelessly, and hammered a power pole near the house. He hit the towering pole with such force, it collapsed on the house. Sparks from a broken power line set the shingle roof on fire.

The fire department came quickly. We didn’t lose much. But there was extensive smoke and water damage. The house was uninhabitable.

We moved into a new frame house a few blocks away. The home builder must have believed insulation was for pansies; all the rooms were cold all the time.

My dad was angry, my mother, Mary, depressed; the kids didn’t know what hit them. An old-fashioned Fairbanks winter, plenty of days with temperatures of 25 below zero or lower, convinced my parents we had to move. But there was no place better we could afford. My parents split up. My dad took a construction job out of town, my mother took my sister and me to live with her brother’s family in the Bronx. She had grown up in this large home, her Irish immigrant parents’ pride.

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The stay was expected to be brief. We called 2815 Sedgwick Avenue home for 15 months — until my dad saved enough money for a new house.

At age 9, I now had a full-time job: stay out of trouble, don’t rile your uncle’s family, especially the cousins. This Fairbanks kid was off on what became his failed lifetime quest — to be a good boy.

What stayed with me from those months? Well, I suppose if a psychotherapist asked me that, I would respond, “Missing my father.”

But missing my father is not easy to remember, and if it shows up today in some form of pathology, I can’t recognize it. What I can recognize from that period is the boxes of books my mother brought home from library sales, kids’ books mostly — “Uncle Wiggily” — but also adult histories of the American people, the crusades, aviation, wars.

I read. Reading, reading, reading, every day. This reading of approved material led to reading the unapproved — the tabloid newspapers adults left around the house.

I had the vocabulary to pick my way through the tabs — and oh, the photos! Movies stars, crooked politicians, deranged murderers, mobsters in handcuffs, scowling Russians, spectacular fires, car wrecks, atomic bomb explosions, a scantily clad woman climbing into paddy wagons under the gaze of cops. This was a nine-year old’s nirvana.

But there were so many words I didn’t understand. Why was the woman entering the paddy wagon a “madame”? Salesmen called my mother madame. What was intrigue, which I pronounced “intergoo”? The Kremlin was full of “intergoo;” so was the White House. What happened when Jersey guys held an orgy, which I pronounced “org-ee”? What was a facade, which I pronounced “fack-aid”? The widow in black was “holding up a brave fack-aid,” but in the accompanying photo, she was carrying only her purse.

I quickly learned you could not ask adults to explain. Inquiries about the madame were met with “none of your business.” But I loved the papers front-to-back, the bold headlines, the pretty girls in trouble, the dead mobsters, the sports section — which introduced me to baseball, and baseball changed my life. I was immediately intoxicated — New York, home to the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, was the center of the baseball universe. I took to baseball like a young bird learning to fly. On television, on radio, actually playing with other kids in the school yard and the street. Baseball was my path to becoming a real New Yorker — or as real as a small boy could be.

Baseball is where I learned math, or at least put math into useful practice. Calculating batting averages and winning percentages. Figuring out earnedrun averages. I also learned geography from the location of major league teams. (St. Louis, for instance, is west of Chicago). And history — baseball had a history.

Baseball cards were handsome information sources to the kid. Photos of the individual player on one side, vital stats on the back. Plus a panel of drawings briefly illustrating the player’s big moments.

What joy.

At school, I was just the kid from somewhere else, like the refugee boy from France, Marcel. I was such a little conformist. Don’t make trouble.

But I was not indifferent to New York. How could anyone be? It was just so damn big, although the Alaska wilderness was big too. But the city was teeming with life, on paper, on the street. The mad, wild variety of it — the people, their dress, their many languages, accents, their foods. I would not say my experience made me a multiculturalist, but it did make me appreciate the human spectacle.

When I arrived back in Fairbanks in July 1954 and was reunited with my dad, I had something in my head I would never forget: Life is so much bigger than the world I was born into. Fairbanks does not have to be my only future.

My life would have been different — I can be sure of that — if a truck driver had missed a power pole.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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