Truth and Consequences

Dear Christopher,

Per your email, you’ve spit into a tube and mailed it to a DNA company and found a cache of untold grandpas.

One untold Grandpa, known as Alan Bennett, was from London, UK. This must be difficult for you because at the age of 16, you watched Mel Gibson scream “Freeeeedddom!” and hated England forever.

But we assure you, there’s nothing more English than hating England.

The story is that your grandparents were swingers, who later fell for each other, and this Alan Bennett gentleman fathered your mother.

You’ve contacted us because you like a do-over.

You’ve noted that your girlfriend has said that your life could’ve been better if your mother lived with her biological father when she was young and perhaps she would’ve provided a better life for you. This is because Alan is the son of the former secretary of Hillman Airways which later became British Airways. Indeed, his known children and grandchildren live relatively prosperous lives compared to you and your four siblings.

It’s true that if we changed her timeline you and your siblings wouldn’t have experienced bouts of homelessness and abuse and your lives would’ve been a lot less rednecky, but to think you’d be a known great-grandkid of the secretary of a major airline is not quite certain and is at best, tricky.

In one of your letters of recommendation it says that your friend believes you’re lost potential. That you’re sharp as a tack, attractive, and bursting with star power and charisma , but it comes with none of the connections that are part of a well balanced and complete upper middle class life breakfast. We are sad to say that’s because those accessories of life are sold separately. If everyone were born with all the connections required to be successful, how could anyone feel they were truly special?

That said, we have found a spot when your mother, Karen, is nine years old, and her mother, your grandmother, Mary, tried to leave her husband and they moved in with Alan for a couple months.

The story goes that it was Karen whose love for her father of record was so great that the couple got back together.

Of course, life is built upon so many consequences. Looking upward has its complications. Perhaps inside every person lies only eight miles of potential and the sky’s the limit. And while it’s eight miles from soil to cloud, if you start from the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles is just the water’s surface and by the time you swim to shore, you’re too far away for the stars. Look, only people born at the summit of Mount Everest reach the stars.

But that doesn’t mean you aren’t important.

Here’s the thing, you did end up going to a good school. Sure, attending in your mid-thirties put you at a disadvantage in your peer group, but it’s also true that you’re the most successful person in your American side of the family going back several generations.

Sure, to the white noblesse oblige of Washington, DC, and your English family, you’re simply a mediocre white guy, but to everyone else you are a rockstar.

If your mom demanded to stay with Alan, her father-of-record would’ve gone to Vietnam, divorced, and probably remarried.

Your mother wouldn’t have gone to high school in Iran because she would be living in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. She would’ve received all the tools that she needed to become a successful woman.

Projections suggest UPenn or Cal Tech would be her alma mater.

There’s a scenario where she lives in Denver, Colorado, runs a successful veterinary practice and lives in the house she always dreamed of. All the bad choices she made in her life are replaced with better and more informed ones.

But, since your mother graduates high school in Langhorne, there’s no reason for her to meet your father, Abe, at a discotheque in Tehran in 1974. Abe will fall in love with a different woman with whom to share his unstable life, wrecked by war and heartache.

There’s one other opportunity for change and that’s after grandfather-of-record dies. If your grandmother told your mother about Alan, her life still could’ve ended up different. Yours too. She probably wouldn’t have gone to Harvard, but she could still open up a vet clinic in Denver. You, on the other hand probably could have attended Harvard or more in line with your personality, Marlboro College.

In one projection, you become a US Senator and in another the author of “Mischievousness in the White Space in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” It sells only 500 copies but cements you on the East Coast as a medieval literature scholar.

You’ve also pointed out that you would like a do over because of the risky encounters you had with lesbian couples after finding out that thanks to your grandparents swinging, your mother is an accident, and you recently found out you weren’t planned either and your parents had a shotgun wedding. You say that you met the couples in back alleys to be a black market sperm donor and you are thoroughly embarrassed.

While we understand why you might be embarrassed, worse things have happened in the history of mankind. While you selfishly tried to procreate, you also were offering childless couples the opportunity to be parents.

We’ve denied your request to change the timeline because there are no bad choices made by your mother and since there are no bad choices by her there there is:

1. No you to experience homelessness as a child and develop a fiery passion that led him to be an anarchist organizer.

2. No you to introduce veganism to a hundred high school students in Frederick, Maryland. Veganism that leads to antiracism, antisexism, radical environmentalism and intersectionality.

3. No you to kick off the punk scene that inspired an entire generation of antifascists in the Mid Atlantic that would end up working for political candidates, nonprofits, and various artistic causes.

4. No you to push consent as sexy to a generation of Millennials living in West Virginia and Maryland.

5. No you to question his closest friends’ belief systems.

6. No you to reshuffle the union at work into a more democratic union.

7. No you to visit your biological grandfather. Which while on the surface is unimportant, meant a great deal to him. None of his offspring look like him, except you. And when you told him you were a librarian, what did he say? In his fading Cockney, “Well you know librarians are very interesting and important people.” He waited for you to visit him, knowing what day you would stop by his house 1700 miles away. A week before you visited he caught sepsis and was given three days to live. You saw him on day seven.

8. No you to make your father happy during his last days. No Chris to tell your father’s life story.

9. No you to watch after your mother as she took her last breaths.

Furthermore, if we change you or your mother’s life, there’s no you.

At least not the you everyone knows. And if there’s no you there’s no one to change everyone’s life you touch for the better.

We suggest that instead of trying to change your history that you continue to try to change the world.

Sincerely,

The Universe