Times You Really Wish They'd Studied Harder

I remember posting on my stopping-drinking blog (invitation only, email me for an invite) that there are exactly two things in my life that I consider deal-breakers: events so shattering that because of them, the entire course of my life was changed. And both of these moments were things that I chose to happen, not things that happened, like losing a father or parents divorcing or things that are obviously earth-shattering but that you have no control over.

No, these two things were decisions I thought long and hard about, knew even at the time that I was making them that they would be life shattering and went ahead and made them anyway. In both cases, chance events beyond my control could have stopped me in my tracks but the way I had planned them, I was pretty sure nothing would go wrong unless I myself fucked up at some point.

I'll keep my explanations of them brief, because I just want to use these incidents as an adjunct to the main point I want to eventually make.

The first thing that shattered my life happened purely by chance, an opportunity that I spotted and took advantage of. My elder brother and I were at Brussels airport in winter of 1972. We were waiting at the gate of a BEA flight that was to take us to London, where we would board a train and return to our boarding school. We had just taken a four-day vacation and had flown all the way back to where my family lived, in Kinshasa of what is now the Congo. We were able to fly on such ridiculously short trips because my father worked for Pan Am and all our flights were free. As our school had this five-day "half-term" break, it was no big deal to fly to Africa for a couple of days and then come back.

Our faithful BEA Hawker-Siddely Trident

Except this time there was a blizzard at Brussels airport and our flight to London was delayed. Very coincidentally, just about three gates down on the other side of the aisle was the gate for the Air Zaire flight that we'd flown to Brussels on, making preparations for its return flight to Kinshasa. It was due to leave actually a few minutes before our delayed plane was scheduled to leave for London.

People were milling about, Africans, mostly, in the gate area. There was about an hour before the plane was due to leave. I said to my brother, "Geoff, what if I just got on that plane and went back to Kinshasa tonight?" (I had my return ticket).

We laughed about it at first, as we both knew it was a ludicrous idea. Complete and utter heresy. All Hell would break loose on both corners of the Atlantic. My school would go ballistic and my parents would also go ballistic. Basically, it had never been done -- we had never heard of a boy simply not coming back to school when he was supposed to. It was like breaking your parole when you were an axe murderer sentenced to fourteen life terms; they'd have the entire police forces of the United States mobilized for your recapture. At least, that's the way WE felt.

But slowly, as the snow sheeted down, we both began to get more and more serious about my actually doing it. To cut a long story short, with Geoff's wave and good wishes, I boarded that flight back to Africa. All Hell did break loose just as we knew it would. But the result was what I wanted: I was pulled from British boarding school and began life in the American school system for ever more.

Just because of a blizzard in a Brussels airport one February night in 1972.

The second life changer is much easier to relate: on some evening in the summer of 1984 I lit and smoked the last cigarette I would ever smoke, after a ten-year habit in which I was finally cracking the three-pack-a-day mark. (Want to quit? Join my blogsite by emailing me above. I guarantee you'll be quit in 30 days and will never smoke again, no gimmicks).

The consequences of all this on the world? Negligible. No one was affected seriously in any way except me and perhaps my family dynamic.

Now consider something else, which is the point I was leading up to. In October, 1907, a young man took the two day entrance exam for a school called the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was sure he would pass the exam; was sure his talents were enough to get him through. He was supremely confident.

But his test drawings were judged unsatisfactory and he was not admitted, with the explanation that "his drawings showed a lack of talent for artistic painting, notably a lack of appreciation of the human form."

He was told, however, that he had some ability for the field of architecture.

His name was Adolf Hitler.

Don't you, and the souls of 80 million human beings, wish that he'd studied just a bit harder, or that his examiner hadn't had such a bad hangover that particular day?

Note: Forgot to mention (this post was a complete coincidence) that today is Holocaust Memorial Day. I hope the temperature in Hell has been doubled in the WWII German section just for today.