Letter From a Friend

[Lightning Rod]

This is a letter written by a friend of mine to his daughter, who is soon to give birth to his grandchild. He is usually a very private writer, but he agreed to let me share this with you.

My son's name is Random Justus. The spelling is different, but since Bob is one of my lifelong inspirations, I allow him license.



------
Love is just totally a random event
that happens following a sequence of
nearly implausible links in a haphazard
daisy chain. I myself am a poster child of the
Prussian roulette randomness of love. (My friend
Clay named his son Random Justice. We might all
of us as well be named Random Justices.) By mere
flukes of time and events, by missed opportunities
or by being at the right place at the right moment,
we all ended up here now. All of us here in this world are in reality the
product of the converging of thoroughly random
casual meetings of people that for one arbitrary
reason or another found this person rather than
that person to fall in love with. Then to make love
on some random full moon or low tide event that
allowed your once in a life egg with ten thousand
traits to be scrambled with a one in a zillion in a
lifetime sperm with yet another ten thousand traits
to meet under the midnight covers after a passionate
climaxing good time (or even MORE random, being picked
and planted by an in vitro roll of the dice by an
uninvolved (genetically speaking) stranger....no
passionate meeting even required, that is wayyyy random). Love got here the same way. There would be something
contradictory, in my sensibility anyway, if we planned for
and then achieved love. A little contradiction in terms
is someone having to plan falling in love.

It's an event waiting to happen to us within seven
degrees (probably less) of separation. Never far away,
always a function of the spinning wheel of serendipity
roulette.

We are the issue of random justices performed in time
and place. It is a process elegant beyond debate, this
improbable arriving at the cross roads of people and
love and nature and the future that is created by us
when we mingle out gametes in the sea of probabilities.
Nothing much more unpredictable than gametes meeting
for the first (and only) time...but that is in fact
who one is. A walking random gamete meeting.

So who will the next one be? The wheel is still in
spin. No master computer could factor the variations
on the theme. Who could predict where love leads?

There are names that follow when this gamete meeting
happens, might be Van Zandt or Random Van Zandt,
maybe a Philip or Philip Random, sometimes it will
be Julian or Random Julian. But no one can call the
real name of the randomness of who is yet to show up.

[justwalt]

very-wow....and the grandchild, I suspect, will be a writer and/or poet? nice words, very-