99 to Go

Somewhere I heard that there are only one-hundred different people-types in the world. “The waiter is the spitting image of Uncle Henry, don’t you think?” “She looks just like Barbra Streisand, but has Mom’s eyes.” One-hundred different people. One-hundred different molds. Are there also only that many different sets of circumstances, experiences?

The man sitting across from me eating scrambled eggs at the lunch counter in diner has blood-shot eyes. He has been up all night making musket balls from molten lead in preparation for the battle at Lexington. Many men will die today. Will he be one of them? I don’t know.

He may be a doctor who just got off the night shift. He’ll soon be on his way to deliver our neighbor’s baby. Her husband suffered a massive stroke yesterday while harvesting his corn. He’ll never function normally again. The doctor sitting across from me will deliver a baby boy who will grow up fatherless, in the normal sense. The son will never be able to have a healthy relationship with a woman, because he’ll be raised by a smothering over-protective mother. He will end up on a rooftop in Des Moines with a rifle, and shatter the lives of six families before finally being shot by a police sharp-shooter.

If there were some way I could convey that to my “counter mate,” what would he do? Would one slight adjustment or variation to the baby’s delivery somehow substitute the new one’s eventual set of experiences for any one of the other ninety-nine?

How many ways are there to die? Can there really be more than one-hundred? In another life had my man at the counter perished at Hastings, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Antwerp? Was he poisoned, hung, shot, burned, or electrocuted, or did he suffocate at the bottom of a collapsed mine shaft? In one of his lives did he die of a broken heart? Did a debilitating disease finally overtake his gallant efforts to survive? What last thoughts went through his mind had he been one of the unlucky to sail on the Lusitania or the Titanic? Could he have been napalmed by his own in Viet Nam? Did he walk out into the freezing night at the South Pole, knowing that his death would mean one less mouth to feed for his rations-poor friends back at camp? Will he be one of the victims of the young man on the roof whom he will deliver in a few short hours?

He wipes some egg yolk off of his mustache. He tugs at one of his rather large ears and runs his fingers through his black hair before biting into a piece of toast. One face, one experience. Ninety-nine to go. I turn to my left and look at the woman who just sat down next to me . . . .