What’s That on Your Back?

 

             What’s That on Your Back?

            To anyone who watches Dr. Who, that question has meaning.

            “Are you my mummy?”

            “Oi! Spaceman!”

            Dr. Donna.

            “Donna Noble has left the library.”

            “What’s that on your back?”

            These are all lines from the modern Dr. Who.

            For those of you who don’t know, Dr. Who is from the planet Gallifrey and travels in the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), which looks like a 1960s police call box from the UK.

            Nowadays, police call boxes are few and far between, and I’m not sure any actually work. They’re even rarer than the red phone boxes that are so iconically British. Still, it’s the Doctor’s mode of transportation.

            In the episode, “Turn Left,” Donna Noble, the doctor’s companion at the time, visits a fortune teller. In the course of the story there’s a giant bug that resembles a giant cockroach on her back that causes her to make an alternate decision from what really happened in her life, and it sets off a chain of events that essentially change history (no spoilers here!).

            While Donna’s ultimate decision is to choose as she had done originally (or did she?), thus saving the universe and killing the massive cockroach, the phrase, “What’s that on your back?” directed at Donna persists through several episodes.

            I didn’t like that episode. For starters, I have always hated cockroaches. Secondly, despite the fact that the story was meant to demonstrate Donna’s inner strength, I felt it was a downward slide of the character into no longer being the Doctor’s companion. She was somehow less than because of something perceived on her back. That’s probably just my take on the story, but there it is.

            Still, it got me thinking about the what-ifs in my life.

            Frequently on Facebook, there are questions like, “If you could do your life over, would you?”

            While most people say no, they wouldn’t want to risk something that might change them having their children or meeting their spouse, I often think about a few different things.

            Given the chance, I would definitely like  to have done better in school, or not dated a few people who were errors in judgement on my part. I don’t think it would have changed my life to have skipped those mistakes. Sometimes turning right is simply turning right (or a banana is simply a banana, as Freud would’ve said).

            While it’s true that better grades might have led to my attending a different university, graduating with a different outcome, getting a job somewhere else in the country than where I live now, and never becoming an OT, it also might not have changed much at all.

            There is the saying that if something is meant to happen, it will.

            Once, on a trip with a friend, I met a guy from Australia while we were in Scotland. We hit it off rather well, and at the end of the evening, he gave me his number, telling me, “When you get rid of your friend, give me a call.” He was, at the time, studying in England.  My friend was leaving a week or so earlier than I was, and he didn’t particularly like her.

I never made that call. I didn’t have the guts. I’ve never been good at phone calls, which is why I prefer of texting people. (But this was before mobile phones.)

            Would it have made a difference?

            Maybe.

            Maybe we would have hit it off and eventually gotten married, and I’d be living in Australia now. That would have started a cascade of changes in my life and the lives of members of my family.

            It might have resulted in my never meeting people who mean a great deal to me since they entered my life.

            But it also might have resulted in fantastic things I could never imagine.

            Or maybe he wouldn’t have been there when I called.

            He might have forgotten who I was.

            He might have decided I wasn’t all that interesting, and what was he thinking, giving out his number.

            Or it might not have been his number. People do that.

            But I’ll never know because I didn’t have the courage to make the call. Instead, I decided to go see Stonehenge.

            There are other things I wish I hadn’t said or done that wouldn’t have changed the course of history. They would have spared me some embarrassment, eating crow, and anxiety. Some lessons shouldn’t need to be learned.

            I often wish I’d asked my gym teacher, back when I was a young, uncoordinated teen, what I could do to improve my athletic ability – or at least be able to pass the President’s Test of Physical Fitness.

            She might have helped, or she might have laughed. Maybe there was nothing. I tried my best, but I’ve about as much athletic ability as I have skill in drawing. Maybe less. I tell people I’m really good at baseball except I can’t catch or hit, and I’m a slow runner. But damn, I am a good pitcher.

            I often wish I had skills or attributes that I don’t. Would it make a difference, or would I even make use of them? Who knows?

            If I were a different person from who I am, things might be better. Or not. Maybe I just have to wait till my next life to find out.

            There are lots of things I wish I’d done, intended to do, but never got to. All the good intentions. And we all know where that road leads.