Category: Happenstance

Up Up Up Up Up Up

“[I]f you follow your heart, you’ll find your purpose and end up proving you were right all along.”

—Overly optimistic Benchly, May 21, 2009

I wonder if any of you have seen the original ending to the movie Sleepless in Seattle. The director, Nora Ephron, decided to cut the final scenes after a test audience nearly went so far as to cut them for her. As you know (or if you don’t, get ready to be spoiled), the theatrical version of the film ends with Sam and Annie meeting at the top of the Empire State Building where they introduce themselves and slowly exit the observation deck, neither able to hide their love-at-first-sight astonishment. Cue the credits.

What you may not know is what happened in the scene that originally followed. After cutting to black and a line telling us that 12 months had passed, we’re shown Annie, Sam, and Jonah eating breakfast in the kitchen of the Seattle houseboat. Sam is reading the newspaper, and Annie, while placing her cereal bowl in the sink, asks Jonah if he’d like more Kix. Jonah replies that he is full and runs into another room to turn on the television. Sam places the newspaper on the table, walks over to Annie, gives her a kiss as he places his bowl in the sink, and says he needs to balance the checkbook. Cue the credits.

So how does that make you feel? Disappointed? Relieved that Ephron ended it when she did? Desperate to find the lost scenes on the Internet? If so, let me save you the trouble. That scene was never filmed. It was never filmed because it was never written. And it was never written because Ephron knew better than to mess with the love story formula: Despite the obstacles of X and the efforts of Z, A and B live happily ever after (unless, of course, they were created by Nicholas Sparks’s imagination). Ephron may have taken an unconventional route in placing the Meet Cute at the end of her film, but she knew that once she had established their Happy Ever After, the only thing she could do next was cut to black, or, at the very most, a shot of hearts on the Empire State Building.

Another movie that followed to a T the same formula of X and Z and A meets B at the end was the tiny, near-perfect French film Happenstance. Some of you have seen this movie. Some of you haven’t. And only the most devout readers (read: reader) of mine might recognize it from the afore-quoted May 21, 2009 blog entry. Like most all of the entries leading up to it, that entry dealt with my struggles with relationships and my path in life. What sets that entry apart, though, is the fact that it was the last of its kind. And it was the last of its kind because it came just 9 days before I met the future Mrs. Benchly and found, with her, my Happy Ever After.

I bring this up today, in my first(!) entry of 2011, because I’ve begun to wonder, should I have followed Ephron’s cue and ended this blog with the above quote? You could argue that this blog has been more than just an outlet for my frustrations and joys with dating and relationships and the single life, but you’d lose that argument in as much time as it would take for one to quote my ninth blog entry. This explains, I think, why this blog has been so quiet for so long: Benchly’sWord, though occasionally home to a non-love-life-related insight or two, has always been about my path to love. And now that I’ve found love, my writer gut is telling me to cue the credits, or, at the very most, a cheesy musical montage featuring clips of previous scenes. But, as a writer, I need this creative outlet. So, what’s a blogger to do?

Like most of the questions I’ve posed through the years, I haven’t had a solid answer to the question of what should become of Benchly’sWord. Until today. Now that I can see clearly, it’s silly to think how long it’s taken me to figure out the next logical step for this blog, but I’ve been under the writer’s block weather for over a year: after a 7-month bout with Engagement Brain, I fell ill with a seemingly never-ending case of the Newlyweds. I still have most of the symptoms, but I’ve slowly been able to manage them, at least enough to be productive. And so it is that I can announce today my solution to my writer’s block:

I’m going to write a new story. In blogging terms, I’m changing directions. In movie terms, I’m writing a sequel. Sure, the sequel may have traces of the original in it (because, people evolve and so do relationships and I’ll want to document those changes), but this story won’t be about my path to love. And it most certainly won’t be about reading a newspaper while eating breakfast. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what it’ll be about. Maybe it will be about creating a home. Or a family. Maybe I’ll find out Darth Vader is my father. Maybe Fredo will break my heart. Or maybe a shark will follow me all the way to the Bahamas to settle a personal feud. Who knows? What I do know is the first act of my life has been written and it’s time for the curtain to come up on Act 2. The lights are flashing. Please take your seats.

Little Plastic Castles

After I left work the other day, I walked down Church Street to my bank to withdraw some money. The coffee shop that has been serving as the gateway to my creativity lately won’t serve me at all without cash. On the walk from the bank to the coffee shop, I spotted Sarah the L sitting outside, soaking in the sun and the words of her most recent read. (As small as this town is, I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to these pleasant surprises it has to offer its residents.) I sat down at her table and we caught up each other on our respective lives. We talked about past and upcoming events, what candy we’d choose to have a lifetime supply of (her choice was caramel, mine was truffles), shared life advice, and snuck in one or two metaphors and idioms for good measure. As always, our conversation helped me to finally articulate the thoughts that had been floating around in my head, and considering I was en route to another evening of writing (this blog entry actually), this encounter’s timing was impeccable.

Last month, one of the modern greats, Ray Lamontagne, came to town to play, sing, and prove once and for all that even the socially awkward have a place in the world. The show, albeit a little too short for my tastes, was everything I had hoped my second Ray concert would be. It began with six of my favorite notes (though, whichever saint watches over great musical act beginnings was napping because Ray quickly broke a string on his guitar and had to begin all over again), Ray’s voice filled the Flynn like a smoke ring from a velvet cigarette, his band complemented him without trying to steal the show, and the songs were arranged in a way that was both refreshingly familiar and delectably new. To make the night even more memorable, I experienced the concert in a second row seat next to my father, marking the first time Papa Benchly and I had been to a concert together since my parents took me to see Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the first time Papa Benchly had been to a rock concert in a long time. Mama Benchly doesn’t like to go to rock concerts and so my dad waxed poetic about the concerts of his past, which included The Doors(!). I think this father-son outing was yet another impeccably-timed surprise for both of us.

Papa Benchly accepted the invitation to join me at the concert approximately one hour before he accepted my extra ticket and joined me at the concert, and to ignore this detail is to sugarcoat a night coated with a bittersweet frosting. You see, the extra ticket was intended for Cherry on Top, and ultimately became Papa Benchly’s a few hours after my relationship with her ended. As much as she may have subconsciously expected it, my impression is that our break-up came as a surprise to her (even if we know it’s coming, we still don’t want to believe it). And with as many break-ups as I’ve been through in my life, I still don’t know that I’ll ever get used to the respective pains of breaking a heart or having my heart broken. But to ignore the next surprise of the night is to not acknowledge the other (equally distinct) half of that bittersweet frosting. You see, as great as Ray Lamontagne was, he wasn’t my favorite musical act of the evening. That honor goes to the opening band, the phenomenal The Low Anthem. You should expect to hear more about them in the next year. And I will expect to one day wax poetic to my son about the time I saw them open for Ray Lamontagne.

Whether you call them a box of chocolates (or caramel), coincidences, serendipity, or happenstance, we can all admit that life is full of these tiny surprises. Happenstance is the title of a French film starring one of my favorite actresses, Audrey Tautou, in a plot based on the Butterfly Effect, the theory that even the smallest variant can alter the future in grand ways (the original title was translated as The Beating of the Butterfly’s Wings). The movie was essentially the 97-minute feature-film-version of the ongoing TV series How I Met Your Mother. Both the film and the TV show revolve around a protagonist looking for his/her “true love”; the obstacles and triumphs each experiences along the way; and the seemingly-random, but ultimately-important events that point each in the right direction. And if you think I’m not a fan of both the film and the TV show, then, well, you haven’t been paying attention the last five(!) blogging years.

All of this is to say that the question that has been occupying my mind lately has been whether or not these moments in my life have a purpose; and to be specific, whether they can be interpreted as some sort of indicator of my life’s purpose. We all like to think we have a purpose in life. In the underrated film Road Trip, one of the characters says he can’t die young: “Something tells me the people of Earth are going to need me.” And I’d be lying if I said that on occasion, I hadn’t felt the same way. As chaotic and scary as this world can be, isn’t it comforting to think each life has a master plan in the shape of a big inviting safety net? Get your heart broken? Don’t worry, it’s just part of the plan. Your car got towed because you tested the Rite Aid parking gods one too many times? That’s OK, everything happens for a reason. Afraid of failing? No need to; failure is just a lesson waiting to happen. And the more we believe this, the less we fear those leaps of faith, the more confident we become, and the less inhibited we act. Through our acceptance of the unknown, we find our strength.

But what if we’re wrong? What if there is nothing guiding us except dumb luck and chance? What if we have every reason to be afraid and are naïve to think otherwise? What if, like Wile E. Coyote, we’ve run off a cliff and the only thing keeping us afloat is our ignorance of the air beneath our feet? And to beat this analogy to death, what if the path we Road Runners have chosen through the mountains of life is simply a Trompe-l’œil? As has been the trend lately, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer except to say follow your heart. And because the blessings in my life have me feeling overly optimistic today, I’ll even go so far as to say maybe if you follow your heart, you’ll find your purpose and end up proving you were right all along. In that sense, I guess Ray Lamontagne was right after all: “The answer is within you.”