A Fortuitous Meeting

*This story is inspired by Dr. Seuss’s story of how he experienced rejection by twenty-seven publishers. He was taking his manuscript home to burn when he took a different route instead of the usual way to his house. On that road, he ran into an old school acquaintance who happened to be in the children’s publishing industry, and he showed him his manuscript. All because of that fortuitous meeting, Dr. Seuss went on to become a bestselling children’s author.

'If I'd been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I'd be in the dry-cleaning business today.’ - Dr. Seuss

Another workday over, another day in the life wasted. That was Arthur Blume’s mindset as he walked home for the thousandth time, after six dreadful years of slaving away to a warehouse company, stacking box after box and pushing carts with weights up to two hundred pounds. He was twenty-seven and his back ached like that of an arthritic old man, and his face was stuck showcasing a permanent frown. While others his age were out building successful careers, getting married, and having families of their own, Arthur hadn’t been in a relationship since high school, lived in a cheap studio apartment that smelled strongly of mothballs and dust, and hardly left his room except to go to work and pick up take-out.

It was starting to become such a blur for Arthur - the days and weeks and years flying by and his youth along with them. Quite frankly, he couldn’t remember the last time he had gone out with friends or had a drink that wasn’t Redbull. He wondered what would happen if he randomly called up his old buddy from high school - Wesley, his name was. A while back, he saw on Facebook that Wesley had gotten married to some woman he met on a cruise in Aruba and now had twin girls. Arthur deleted his Facebook soon after that, as it started to make him nauseous to watch others’ so-called amazing lives pan out before him while he was a walking train wreck. No - Wesley probably wouldn’t even want to associate with someone like him, anyway.

As Arthur trudged one foot in front of the other on the chipped city sidewalk, he wondered if his life would ever be different - if he would have the life he’d always dreamed of, white picket fence and all. He was nearing thirty and his luck with dating was nonexistent; perhaps he would just have to accept that women were just not attracted to him. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, he hoped . . . but if it wasn’t his looks, then what else was wrong with him? His mother seemed to think he was okay, at least.

He breathed deeply, contemplating these things as he watched passersby come and go. The air of late autumn was crisp like that of a Granny Smith apple, with hints of cinnamon wafting about from cafes with open doors. Around him there were lovers on their first or fifth date, families out for an afternoon stroll, young college students studying for their exams. He felt odd, out of place. Like he didn’t belong among these people with lives that mattered; people who were going places.

Back in high school, Wesley hated the idea of marriage and having kids. Well, there he was in Aruba with his family, and here was Arthur, still on his own. Maybe he’d want to switch lives. High school is a funny time - you start out with ambitions and goals to take over the world, but that’s only because you have no idea what it’s going to be like when you turn eighteen, when life slaps you in the face. Arthur remembered vaguely the dreams he had while still a pubescent teenager: silly ideas like becoming an author and publishing the story he had been writing since he was just fourteen. These dreams were just fantasies now - something that would never come true. Good things just never seemed to happen to him like they did to everybody else. And unless some miracle came along to sweep him off his feet, it was going to stay that way.

Arthur Blume had been carrying his manuscript around with him everywhere he went for seven years in the dim-witted hopes of meeting with a publisher who would be willing to take his book. “Oh, you dropped your briefcase?” He imagined he would say, casually. “Here, let me pick that up for you. You’re on your way to your meeting for the New York Times, you say?” 

This fateful evening on his way home from work, when the September sky was fading its peach clouds to a burnt orange sunset, was no different. In his carrier bag was three hundred or so pages of his novel about a young boy who took a walk and ended up traversing all the way around the world. All because he decided to get some fresh air, the boy’s feet took him to the South side of Italy, then the French Quarter in New Orleans, and then up mountains in Iceland. Arthur knew it was a ridiculous hope to actually be published one day, a one in a million chance, but having a dream at twenty-seven that you knew wouldn’t actually come true wasn’t the worst thing in the world, was it?

Arthur came to a four-way crosswalk that he came to every single day - he knew the way home so well he could walk it blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. He was supposed to turn right, and around the corner would be the street leading up to his apartment, but for some reason Arthur felt a queasiness about going that way today. Maybe he just needed to change things up in his life. Maybe he needed to quit feeling sorry for himself and get out of his comfort zone. After all, don’t they say that the best people are the ones you hadn’t planned on meeting at all? And the best places the ones you never usually go to? Arthur turned left toward a street with a crowded bus stop.

The bus stop was filled with antsy people waiting for the eight-o-clock ride - a melting pot of diverse strangers with their own lives and families and problems and successes, and yet the universe had joined them all together on this day. Arthur wondered if anyone else saw the beauty in waiting for the bus. Or the beauty in a walk down the street - how every single person passing by was a human being with pain and sorrow, thoughts and feelings and memories that made them laugh and cry when they thought about it, who reminisced their past with a fondness that you look upon your own. In each and every car speeding past, there was a person with a mission - where were they going? To rekindle with an old flame at a five-star restaurant, or go home to their children who would run up and greet them at the door? You will never know, as they will never know where you are headed.

Sometimes, life gets so busy that you miss these things, and you’re left contemplating what went wrong in your own life, without paying attention to the thousands of people around you living lives who have gone through similar things. We get so caught up in our own lives that we forget that we aren’t the only ones who have lived. With two millenniums and seven billion people on this earth right now, every problem that you face has been faced by someone before you, and will be faced by someone after you. It is the continuum of life.

The bus arrived five minutes late. As the passengers groaned and checked the time on their phones, Arthur watched each of them step on board. A middle-aged woman helping her elderly mother get on the bus and weave through the sea of people. From the lines creasing the corners of the middle-aged woman’s eyes and the dark circles encasing them underneath, she looked like she had been through it all: the kind of laughter that made your belly hurt, and the kind of hurt that made you feel like you couldn’t breathe. Arthur imagined the creases in her eyes indented from a smile, and her frantically trying to dye the white hairs on her head that arose from stress. 

A teenage girl with pink hair and the side of her head shaved looked bored as she paid her fee and headed straight to the back of the bus. Most likely, she carried the adolescent philosophy that she wouldn’t be able to do something drastic like dye her hair pink once she got older, and so the time had to be now before it was too late. Maybe she was right. Maybe when you grew older, things that seemed simple back then became drastic now: grabbing two muffins instead of one, spending a little too much money on shoes, and turning left instead of right on the way home from work.

A man in his late twenties, biting his lip nervously and tapping his foot as he waited to board, as if he thought he was going to be late to some business meeting. A New York Times meeting, perhaps? Arthur thought humorously. He wished that he could tell this man that whatever it was, it was going to be okay. His life couldn’t be as bad as he thought, if he was here wearing a dapper suit and tie in the middle of a busy and never-sleeping city.

Arthur realized then that he was basically describing himself - a young man nervous for the future, unsure whether or not things would ever go the way he wanted. Both of them wanted more out of this life - to make it a life worth living. Without thinking twice, Arthur boarded the bus behind the suited man, scavenging some spare change from the back pocket of his jeans. The man was already sitting by the time Arthur reached him.

“Hey,” said Arthur, reaching out to shake the man’s hand. He looked up from his bobbing knee and hesitantly took Arthur’s hand, not sure what to make of the situation. “Is this seat taken?”

The man shook his head and scooted over to make room. Arthur sat, but the man immediately looked away and pretended to focus on something outside the window. The bus started moving, and Arthur Blume was on a journey to somewhere only time would tell. To tell the truth, he was beginning to feel as nervous as the man beside him, so much so that Arthur’s fidgeting caught his attention.

“Are you nervous?” asked the man.

“Yeah. Are you?” asked Arthur.

“Oh, plenty.” His gaze lowered back to his knees. “I’ve got this big job interview I’m going for, and I think I’m already screwed. I’m five minutes late, and I'm not even halfway there.”

Arthur laughed. “I thought it was something like that that was making you squirm. What’s all the fuss about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Get ready to laugh again.” He sighed, his confidence clearly at his ankles at this point. “I’m trying to get into the publishing industry. I’m starting off with a small press first, but I’m planning on going big. Like, New York Times big.”

Arthur didn’t hear anything else he said. Instead, he stared at him blankly in the face, stunned. “You’re kidding.”

The man shook his head. “Right. You think it’s a joke.”

Arthur pulled his manuscript out of his bag. “No, no. I think that's probably the best thing I've heard in years.” He explained to him that he had carried this novel with him everywhere, hoping that there would come a time when he could pass it over to someone in the publishing industry.

“It still hasn’t happened, though. Remember I haven’t actually gotten the job yet? You might just be talking to a failure.”

“No. I’m talking to someone who is like me. Who knows what he wants. Except you’re not afraid to get it.” Arthur took in a deep breath and handed his manuscript to the publisher, then clasped his hands together. “I think we all just need to do that. To stop waiting for something big to happen. For that date to call you back, or that pay check to come rolling in with six figures. If you want something, just do it. But you can't expect it to happen overnight.”

The man hid a hint of a smile as he took the papers from Arthur. He read a couple of pages before he said, “The way you write - it makes it feel like I’m really there. It's like I've lived this before, but I haven't. But in a way, haven't we all mindlessly trekked through life at one point without a care as to where we'd end up? Haven't we all experienced the woes that life has to offer and wished to just go for a walk and never come back?" He patted Arthur on his shoulder and gave him a wink. "I think you're onto something here, Arthur Blume. You're telling me no one has wanted to publish this before?”

Arthur shook his head, grinning. In later years, he wondered how his life would have turned out if he had turned right instead of left on his way home from work that day, or if he had chosen that was the day to burn his manuscript.