Alternate Universes

Ben and I were heading home the other day and as we were driving down Lincoln and crossed 22nd Street, I was reminded of a time—a lifetime ago, it seems—when my family almost bought a house in that neighborhood.

It was during eighth grade—or perhaps shortly after I'd graduated. Dad was rightfully proud of the work he'd recently done for Hallcraft on their new Biltmore Highlands subdivision, so one sunny Saturday we headed over to what seemed at the time to me like the far east side of the valley to check it out. I don't know how the talk started, but before I knew it we went from looking at the model homes to being shown one house in particular a few streets over that my parents were actually considering buying. It was a large, beautiful three bedroom, two bath place with a courtyard entrance, a spacious kitchen and a large family room with a fireplace. The bedroom that was to be mine was significantly larger than my current room, eliciting no small amount of excitement on my part. The room also had two windows instead of one.

My enthusiasm was tempered somewhat by the fact that it would now actually cost to phone my best friend (apparently calling from certain Phoenix exchanges to certain Glendale exchanges back in the day incurred wasn't free).

This move also meant that my sister and I would be transferring to a new school district, something I think caused my parents' eventual decision to bail on that house and that particular subdivision.

We did end up moving into a new home a few months later, actually only about a half mile south of where we had been living, so the seed had definitely been planted. I'm sure economics were also a factor; we got a much larger house for less money in Hallcraft's Bethany Heights than we would've gotten if we'd moved to Biltmore Highlands.

Ironically, even though my best buddy and I now actually lived closer to each other than we had previously with this move, after high school started we drifted apart and each went our separate ways. (I found out many, many years later that Neal—whom I'd known since 4th grade—transitioned to Angela sometime in our twenties. He'd always told me he'd felt like a girl trapped in a boy's body, so this did not come as a huge surprise.)

What does all this have to do with the title of this post? Well, I got to thinking how different (or perhaps not) my life would've been had we actually moved to Biltmore Highlands and my sister and I had been forced into a new school district.

Obviously, I would never have met the people or made the friends I did if I'd gone to a different school than the one I did, but I wonder if life post-high school would've actually been that different. I'd still have undoubtedly gone to the University of Arizona in Tucson and had similar experiences. Or would I?

A currently popular idea in cosmology is that there are an infinite number of universes, each one calving off and growing on its own, depending upon what choices are made. And not just your choices, but multiply that by the billions of other souls on this rock and it boggles the mind. Multiply that by the number of possible planets and potentially sentient beings in the universe, and it truly becomes an unimaginable number.

So it's always an interesting "what if" game to play. What if I'd actually gone to ASU instead of UofA, stayed in school and gotten my degree? What if I'd kept on going the night I walked out of The Joshua Tree and never met Dennis? What if Bernie and I never visited San Francisco—much less moved there?

I suppose there's a certain satisfaction in knowing that if this multiverse idea is in fact reality that somewhere, maybe as close as the orbit of an electron—there are universes where Hitler was never born; where JFK was never assassinated; where you are just as likely to be President of the United States as you are to be living in a cardboard box under an overpass; a world where the Dark Ages never occurred and Christianity never gained a foothold; a world where you actually bought that Apple stock in the 90s; a world where mankind has already colonized the solar system and is moving out to the stars…