Every time I’ve flown into LaGuardia, I’ve thought we were going to land in the water. The airport sits on Flushing Bay in Queens, and until the last second, all I see is grayish-blue. Then, just as I wish I’d paid attention to the floatation device instructions even once in my decades of air travel instead of fiddling with the overhead air conditioning knob or adjusting my purse with my feet, a strip of land appears and the plane touches down.
I’ve had 44 years of “almosts.” Some good, some bad, some I never knew which they would be until months or years later when a moment knocks me in the face. My husband almost took a job in Fort Stewart, Georgia last summer, and this past Wednesday, an active shooter news alert came through my phone about five soldiers shot on base. Yet again, a gunman opening fire. Another round of wall-to-wall coverage. Another set of lives changed. The exact spot of the shooting wasn’t where my husband would have been. But the “almosts” flooded through me anyway. How we almost moved there. The terror he almost experienced. How that would have stuck with him for a long while. And the almost stroke I didn’t have because I didn’t get that news alert while he was working on base and I was doing laundry a couple miles down the road.
Back in the day, I almost transferred to college in Boston, but a sudden medical issue kept me in Kentucky. Had I gone, the trajectory of my life would have changed. I wouldn’t have known it. But I think about things like that. How our dog, Harry, was with us a couple months longer than he could have been and how we almost didn’t get his even sillier successor, Bella, because she would not have been born yet. Last October, I almost didn’t break my toe like a dumbo, stubbing it on a chair while putting away dishes. Oops. Almost.
The almosts will get ya sometimes. But they can be such blessings. They’ve affected my perspective and given me extra dazzle to carry in my pocket. I’ve almost died twice. Been told dying was a possibility more than a dozen times. But then, like a plane that seems it’s about to splash into New York’s Flushing Bay, a runway appears, and I manage to land on solid ground and taxi into a gate. Those almosts. They make me gulp the air sometimes. But they also encourage me to look up at the trees a little more and listen to the birds a little sharper. They show me how to focus on the roses before noticing the weeds.
Sarah Mackey Kirby 