“Every night this husband and wife would argue with each other,” my friend Ron, a former police officer, was telling me over lunch just before Christmas a few years ago.
“The guy would yell at the top of his lungs and pound his fists against the walls. And the woman would whimper, probably afraid for her life.”
We were chatting at our favorite diner in Queens, New York. Ron, then in his 80s, liked to tell me stories about his adventures as a patrolman on the beat in the Bronx, which spanned more than 20 years.
“Other tenants in the apartment building would hear this commotion and call the police to complain,” he said. “They worried someone might get hurt. And I would go knock on the door to see what all the trouble was about.”
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So went Ron’s career in law enforcement. No shootouts with murderers. No high-speed car chases after bank robbers. No busts confiscating a million dollars in heroin. Just a cop who knew everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone knew him.
Ron never had to pull his gun out of its holster on the job. But he knew how to talk to people. He had a flair for breaking up domestic disputes. And on this occasion, he convinced the husband to simmer down and even apologize to his wife.
“But what did it mean?” Ron suddenly asked me. “What does any of it really mean?”
My friend tended to get philosophical. He lived in a house by himself. His wife had died decades earlier and, more recently, his daughter, too, his only child. He seemed down so often I suspected he might some day kill himself. After all, more than a few cops regardless of age do.
Ron said, “Sometimes I get depressed thinking none of it means anything.”
But I could get philosophical too. “All of it means something,” I insisted. “Everything.” And I meant it.
We both resumed eating our lunch for the next minute or two.
“Let’s say that because you broke up that argument, the couple went on to have a happy marriage,” I posited. “And let’s suppose they eventually had a child. Who grew up to become a scientist. And one day discovered a cure for cancer. It would be because of you. Because you happened to knock on that door.”
“That would mean something, right?”
Ron just stared at me, absorbing this scenario, speechless but nodding up and down.
Later, after we parted company, I realized I had unwittingly taken a page from the “What if?” propositions so vividly depicted in the classic Christmas movie “It’s A Wonderful Life.” In it, Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey is in such desperate despair over his life on Christmas Eve that he prepares to kill himself by jumping off a bridge into an icy river.
Luckily for him, a guardian angel named Clarence Odbody is dispatched from heaven to prevent it. Afterward, Bailey tells Clarence, “I wish I’d never been born.”
And just like that, Clarence grants his wish. George gets the unique opportunity to witness how life in his hometown would have taken many turns for the worse had he never existed. He learns, for example, that had he not been born, he wouldn’t have been there to save his younger brother Harry from drowning in a frozen lake as a boy. But because of George’s intervention, Harry grows up to fight in World War II as a fighter pilot and prevents a kamikaze attack on a troop transport, heroically saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Harry comes home bearing the Medal of Honor.
All of our actions have consequences.
A few weeks ago, Ron told me he has cancer. He has gone in and out of the hospital, getting treatment and multiple surgeries. That cure for cancer I speculated about at the diner would come in handy right about now. It just might prove to Ron that our lives indeed have meaning — and his no less than any other.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
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