Beware of Falling Pianos

In every old Warner Bros. cartoon I remember watching, some character gets plunked on the head by a piano/anvil/boulder that falls out of nowhere from the sky. Because of the many hours of television I ingested as a kid, deep in my subconscious lies the fear that the same fate just might await me.

The other day, I rounded the corner onto Waverly Street (near the mysterious intersection in the Village where Waverly St. intersects with Waverly St. at the equally mysterious Northern Dispensary building). There, in the middle of the sidewalk, was an obliterated air conditioning unit. There was no one else around--no frantically concerned party on the street, no desperate shouting voice from above. Just an 8,000 BTU window unit that had evidently fallen several flights to its untimely demise.

The way New Yorkers jury-rig these things in their windows, it's a little shocking there aren't a half-dozen fatalities in the city every summer--apparently, mercifully, there are few, if any.

The scene did give me a brush with my mortality, though. Some years back in a seminary class called "Death and Dying," our first assignment was to write our own death certificate, describing in detail the day, place, and circumstances of our own death. We were invited to imagine our death in as much detail as our mind allowed. My mind settled into a dark country road at night, shrouded by fog. As I pulled my car slowly into a strange intersection, a car hurtling from my left (was he drunk?) slams into my passenger side. That was it. I left a wife... and kids.

Morbid? Maybe. But I don't suppose I'm alone in having visions of my own death. I'd expect others do too, though surely we rarely, if ever, share them with one another. But are they as scary as they feel? Perhaps these visions of death are essential for a good life. For one, they may simply keep us aware of our surroundings--alert us to our vulnerability and heighten our care about the dangers around us all the time. Perhaps our shadowy visions of death also make the contrasting radiance of life--even the pedantic parts of life--a bit brighter, too. My vision was enough to make a normal, everyday walk down the street on a sunny summer day into an opportunity to meditate on the fragile, contingent beauty of my own existence.

None of which implies that you shouldn't secure your durn window unit to make sure you don't kill someone.