From Vet to Vet

My father wanted to be a veterinarian. He was attending Oklahoma State University on a wrestling scholarship, which was one of the only means for him to pay for tuition. His grades weren’t exactly on par with what was expected of collegiate athletes, and what happened to boys flunking out of college in the late 1960s was a little thing called Vietnam. There, my father went from vet to vet. I’ve often wondered how different his life might’ve been had he been a vet of the animal doctor kind instead of the one holding heavy artillery in the Da Nang Delta.

So, it got me thinking about all those moments in life when you’re headed one way and before you can blink, a crossroads occurs. I heard about these a lot when I worked at CNN–the stories of people who were running late to work at the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001, or tourists who barely missed the 2004 Asian Tsunami by coincidently checking out of their hotel within hours of it getting hit. Or horrific outcomes of circumstance like Daniel Pearl who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time asking too many questions. It thankfully turned out differently for The Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll whose updates I followed religiously and have left me wondering now, how that period has changed her life perspective.

But, these acts are all around us, not just on the news. Everyday, to folks much like my father.

They are the weddings being called off countered with those being planned. The teeter-totter of life, or as I call them, the Sliding Door moments. You know, the movie where Gwyneth Paltrow gets fired (or in the movie, “sacked”), in one scenario she misses the train, in the other, she catches it only to find her boyfriend carrying on an affair. Life’s parallel shifts.
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