"Back When We Were Grownups"

I am about to finish another novel by Anne Tyler. This time the novel is called "Back When We Were Grownups." As I think about the other novels that I have read by Tyler, it seems to me that she, like most preachers, has one major story line and she tells that story in a lots of different ways. Anne Tyler seems to spend a lot of time and thinking about the way people look at their own lives. She suspects that most of us think that our lives should have been different. We wonder how in the world did we ever get here. In this version of the story, there is a fifty year old widow who looks at her life one day at a picnic and suddenly realizes that she has been living somebody else life. That somewhere back there she took one fork in the road and it was the wrong fork. She was in college, dating her high school sweetheart, and suddenly at a party a new older man with three little girls sweeps her off her feet and in two months they marry. She drops out of college and she takes on the responsibility of raising those girls, having one of her own, and running the business for the extended family.

She thinks that she was a victim of fate. That events just happened to her so fast that she was swept along. Other people's decisions and wishes were followed and she lacked the courage and the will to take charge of her life. She tries to go back and see what it might have been like to take the other fork in the road. The story is the consequence of that examination.

Surely there is a great deal of material for the question of free will and the providence of another will. Is she being molded to become whom she was created to be even if she did not know that she was supposed to become this new person? How do we make our decisions and what credit or responsibility do we have for what happens to us. Tyler works in a strong sense in some of her works the obligation to accept and live with the consequences of our actions. The interplay between "stuff happens" to us and makes us do things and our human responsibility to make decisions is a major part of her novels.

So often when we do look back at our history and the things that have happen to us that were surprises and that came unwanted there does seem to be a connected thread of Providence that seems to be moving us towards a place that is good for us.