Ad Infinitum I am nothing but a patient man.

A crazy night or They do say things come in 3s

There are some nights when a confluence of events come together. It is hard to know what it all means at the time or how one's own role will play out.

Tonight brought me into the path of not 1, not 2, but 3 separate tragedies. Along the way I passed a great kid on the street, met with a group of like minded people whose goal is to make our city great and heard a story of self-sacrificing love, ending in death.

There is a lot to be said for irony.

I have been volunteering for Chicago Cares since January of 2006. The projects I've worked on have taken me all across the city from north to south, west to southwest and beyond. 3 of those projects were in Englewood, a part of the city known for drugs and violence. I've joked more than once about needing a flak jacket to go into those neighborhoods. Tonight the meeting I had was at Patrick Henry Elementary School, 4250 N St Louis, which is less than a mile from a close friend's previous address. As we were leaving tonight, I offered to drop a friend off at the Kimball Brown Line station. As we drove north on Kimball, two Chicago Police Department Suburbans wailed past us, turning right onto Montrose. We went another few blocks north and a third CPD Suburban was going south and again onto Montrose.

From there I dropped my friend off at the train and proceeded to drive home. During that drive I came across the 3rd tragedy of the evening (if you are counting, I haven't relayed number 1 yet). As I approached the intersection of Rand Rd (Rt. 12) and Old McHenry Rd in Lake Zurich, I saw many flashing police lights, road flares and (unusually) flood lights. As our flow of north bound traffic was redirected east onto Old McHenry, it was clear that a major accident had happened some time ago. There were at least 4 cars (and probably more) that I could see still left in their accident prone positions. A police officer had survey equipment that he was using. There were no ambulances present. My exposure to the scene lasted all of 2 minutes, after which I didn't see any more of it.

During this time I was on the phone with a close friend, learning about her recently deceased sister who had literally worked herself to death caring for her two children born with Spina Bifida. It was at once a sad tale of hardship and suffering but at the same time a story of loving sacrifice. The essence of a Christian life, the giving of one's self for another's well being. Don't get me wrong, there was as much personal tragedy in this story as in the other 2 lives lost which I came across tonight but here at least there was a point to the suffering.

Revelations

It wasn't until I got home that a picture began to emerge about the different circumstances I had brushed past this evening. It was entirely thanks to Apple and Twitter that I even knew what had happened. I was working on an iPad for the first time and in playing around with it to see what could be done, I setup my twitter account, tried out Flipboard and a number of others programs I regularly use on PCs or my Android powered phone. Whilst perusing the twitter feed I came across a headline about two teens shot in the city; a fairly common occurrence in recent years. When I clicked on the link I didn't think much at the time, like I said, shootings in Chicago seem to be a dime a dozen. Once on the link though my heart sank a little. The caption included the neighborhood, Albany Park. In reading the article, there really wasn't much information known at the time. Two kids shot, one dead. The timing was eerie, about 7:45pm, right when our Chicago Cares training was ending. Both were taken to Illinois Masonic hospital where two of my daughters were born. Again, nothing unusual about that but still brushing uncomfortably close with much of my own personal life.

Reading about this incident lead me directly to information about the accident I came across later. From the article on the shooting, I was scrolling through the headlines of the Chicago Tribune site only to find another ominous title, 10 year old killed in Lake Zurich car accident, or something very close to that. This incident happened at about 5:30pm, right when I was wrapping up work for the day, getting ready to go up to the Volunteer Leader training. According to the article, the 10 year old was killed and his twin brother and father seriously injured when their car collided with a dump truck. There weren't really any more details than those.

As I said, and as the title of this post implies, there was a 3rd incident this evening that I came into contact with. I've intentionally left this one for last, partly because it was minor in relation to the others but mostly because I didn't think much of it at the time. Having lived in the city, and continuing to work there, I come across fender benders, minor accidents, ambulances, work crews, crazy people and who knows what else, all the time. So tonight, as I drove north on Kimball, crossing Elston, I noticed traffic in front of me moving very slowly. I assumed (partly correctly) that we were backed up because of a stop sign. This was true, there was a stop sign, but in the southbound lane at the stop, there was a car stopped with a crowd of people in front of it. It appeared that a person (with unknown amounts of personal stuff) was sitting in front of the car as if having fallen, or gotten hit. Immediately as I approached the scene, a firetruck, ambulance and police car arrived. I was able to navigate around all of those vehicles and get to my destination at Patrick Henry without much delay. The cars trying to go south were however quite backed up. As I passed, many were falling into the typical Chicago driver habit of honking at what they couldn't see in some vain effort to effect nothing more than the irritation of the others waiting in the same predicament.

Concluding thoughts, if there can be any.

I'm not sure what to really think of tonight. For some reason each step of my path home was paralleled with a personal tragedy for someone else. When I was at school in Oregon I saw 2 people on bicycles get hit by cars and a 3rd person get hit by a bus. None were related and all were separated by significant time and distance. As with tonight, there was nothing that I could personally do about any of those events and yet I was connected for some reason. There is a danger here to project my personal ego onto these situations, making my own encounters more significant than they really are. I am aware of this danger and proceeding on just the same.

Also while at school in Oregon I developed the following theory. (I studied philosophy at UIC so don't expect formulas or research to back any of this up...) After coming into contact with someone or something for the first time (or again after a long absence) we are highly likely to encounter that person or thing again within a very small time frame (as compared to how long we lived prior to the first encounter. So for example, while giving blood one day at Oregon State, I sat next to a woman whom I had never met/seen before. We were in close proximity for 15 or 20 minutes whilst our blood was harvested and then we each went our separate ways. Several hours later I was sitting in front of the basketball arena and who should walk by but this same woman. This was not a high traffic time. There were few people around, one of them being her. I had gone 19 years without ever seeing her and then there she was, twice in one day in two very different parts of the campus. OSU is a large campus but still a relatively closed community so I'll grant that this example may not be earth shattering, but it is literally one of several dozens that I have observed in the 10 years since leaving Oregon.

Another example which blows my mind also comes from Oregon. After I was medically disqualified from the Air Force ROTC program I had a hole to fill in my academic schedule and so I opted for an honors class in philosophical writing. We students in the class collaborated with our professor, Kathleen Dean Moore, to write a companion book to a text book Kathleen had written on philosophical arguments. We went along chapter by chapter, using the argumentative principles in our own essays and explanations. In one of those papers I laid out this theory. We had notions of publishing the book but to my knowledge nothing has ever come of it, it was however bound and so we each have a few copies. This endeavor took place in the winter/spring of 2002. After finishing that year at OSU I transferred to UIC and began taking the train in Chicago each day for school. Whilst waiting at the train station one day for the trip home I picked up a copy of the magazine Science at the Borders in the train station. In doing so I did something which I hadn't done much previously and have rarely done since: I read through the bios of the contributors to that issue. It should surprise no one that one of those featured contributors was none other than Kathy Moore, my professor from Oregon State whom I had worked closely with not too many months before. For all I know she wrote the article in that issue while I was studying with her. Mind blowing.

I haven't had much time to figure out if there is any cosmic meaning or significance to this theory. My brother and I trade stories of witnessing the theory in action, only to emphasize how much of a 'stinking genius' I am. Tonight though the theory showed its unpleasant corollary, that tragic events happen together just as easily as surprising or pleasant ones. When I drove by the 1st incident, I was not expecting another, let alone 2 more to come along my path. My own personal faith has seen many ups and downs but has consistently traveled along a constant path. Along the way my commitment to personal prayer has seen similar ups and downs. At the moment I don't pray as much or as often as I would like. There is one time however when I almost always stop and say a prayer and that is when I see or hear an emergency vehicle. A quick 'Our Father' goes out to those impacted by the siren. Intellectually I don't know that my prayers make any difference. I cannot be so presumptive to think that I encountered each of these tragedies tonight so that I could be there to pray for the victims, but in each case, without knowing beforehand what had happened, or why, I said a prayer. My faith maintains that God heard those prayers and some how the suffering of the victims was lessened. I believe in a loving and benevolent God and as such I don't think He needs my imploring to be any more merciful but if my small, insignificant request for intercession helps at all then that is reason enough for me to have intersected tonight's events.