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from the gas company found a
carbon-monoxide leak instead and shut our furnace down.
They said that we were lucky we didn't wait until Monday
morning to call. I remember my dad forked over a good
chunk of his life savings without a word of complaint to have
the furnace replaced that very night, which turned out to be
the coldest of the year. We lay in our beds beneath mounds of
blankets and comforters listening to the workmen clanking
in the basement beneath us. It was 3:00 A.M. when they fired
up the new furnace, and the temperature in the house was
38 degrees. For a long time after that, I dated things from that
day; the day we didn't die.
    In my teens and twenties, I had several close calls that
involved automobiles or alcohol—or both. Once my brother
was trying to get my dad's Chevy station wagon up to 100
mph on a long, straight county road in rural Michigan. There
was one blind spot on the whole stretch, and when we came
over the rise, a 2 1/2-ton farm truck was pulled across the
road. The driver saw us and started forward, we braked hard
and steered behind him, skidding right beneath his tailgate,
which was cocked at a 45-degree angle and which scraped
the hell out of the roof of the car.
    Another time after playing softball and drinking beer, I was
driving someone else's car way too fast on an unfamiliar road
when I almost missed the same kind of curve Lisa Kim missed.
I braked and slid sideways through the gravel and off the road
into high grass. Had there been a ditch there, I would have rolled
into it; and had there been a tree, I would have hit it very hard.
Once, after helping friends move on a hot day, we were drinking
beer and eating pizza on the roof of their new apartment
building when we dared each other to walk the ledge around
the perimeter. I still don't know how we all made it.
    There were two airplane flights, one out of Columbus that
hit a front like a stone wall on its initial ascent, and one into
Quito, Ecuador, on a foggy night surrounded by the Andes
when the pilot came in to land three times and roared off
three times before he finally touched down the fourth time,
and the flight attendants led the applause for what one of
them said was "a very, very difficult landing."
    Then there was a bump that turned out to be a sebaceous
cyst, a heart murmur that disappeared, a lab test that was in
error, and a bandit wearing a Yankees cap and a blue bandana
over his face and holding a very small gun in his right hand
who stepped out from the bushes when I was riding horseback
in the hills of Jalisco in Mexico. He had me dismount, pull my
wallet out and lie facedown in the dusty road. As he leaned
to remove the Mexican currency from the wallet (he left the
American money), he put the gun against the back of my head.
And those are only the close encounters I'm aware of. Who
knows how many others I might have walked through or past
like Mr. Magoo, with things crashing all around me.
    When I finally put my pen down, it was afternoon, and I
was exhausted. I had not expected to write so much or for so
long; incidents came back one after another. I did not know
how lucky I had been, nor how lucky any of us has to be to
stay alive on this planet for very long. I closed my journal and
went home.
    The next day I made a second entry. This time I started
writing down everything I could remember about Lisa Kim's
accident. I guess, in a way, it was the beginning of this piece
you are reading now.
    In college I would hurry across the campus just to look in my
mailbox, and the sight of one trim envelope through the little
window would make my heart skip a beat. Now if I'm busy,
I often don't open my box for two or three days at a time—
nothing but bills, catalogs, and credit-card come-ons usually,
seldom the kind of hand-addressed linen envelope I found
there on a day late in January. The return address stopped
me: Maud Kim Nho, Meadow Lane, Glenview. I stood right
there in the vestibule and opened it.
    First there was a