Which Universe Did I Wake Up in THIS Morning?

Sunday afternoon Parker and Isaac and I drove out to a friend's house on Lake Tuscaloosa. It was not the first time I had driven out there, and it likely won't be the last. As I was driving, Parker said "Ooh, it's really pretty out here," and I agreed.

More than three years ago, when Parker came into this world, but before he was born, the world changed. I was driving out to the same house on Lake Tuscaloosa for the third of a set of meetings being held at the house (in other words I had driven out there before, and recently), but I got lost. I called ahead to tell them I was running late, and Susan told me I had missed a turn. But I didn't remember any turn. As far as I could remember there had never been another turn to miss out there before, but Susan assured me that it was true. To this day I still do not know how I could have forgotten a turn that had always been there. As far as I was concerned the route to my friend's house had changed, even though it couldn't have.

That was strange. It was as though I had passed over into a different universe with the conception of my child.

I used to imagine sometimes when I was a teenager that at some point I would wake up and discover that my life was really a dream. I guess the world seemed very unreal in comparison with the things I read in books, and the social isolation I often felt must have been oppressive to me. As I sat down to write this just now I experienced a brief shiver of horror to think of my life having never had Parker in it. It's odd where the imagination can go, and what can spark it.

Another weird sort of thing happened on Sunday that made me think of alternate realities. I was going to someone else's house later in the evening, and as I had never been there before, I wrote the house number down along with the driving directions in my little green notebook. As I drove to the house on Lake Tuscaloosa, I noticed the house number on the mailbox. The house on Lake Tuscaloosa was numbered 10885. The house I would be going to later in the afternoon is practically at the other end of the county, but it's number is 10889. I checked those numbers just now to make sure I hadn't transposed one of them in my head, but they are accurate. How odd.