Marjorie Anderson
EDMOND — Knock-knock. That’s opportunity at the door. Think twice before you open it, but don’t dawdle. Wait too long and opportunity might be gone. Act too quickly and you might wish you hadn’t. It’s a fate thing. Sometimes you’re darned if you do and darned if you don’t.
Suppose four of you face off at a four-way stop sign and you aren’t sure which of you got there first. Your left turn signal is blinking. The driver on your left motions you on. Is that an opportunity you want to take? Can you trust the other two drivers to stay put?
Beep. Beep-beep. Time’s up. The traffic behind you is growing restless, so you forge ahead. Next time you’ll take the opportunity to be aware of your place in order.
Or say you’re standing at the back of a long line at the post office and a friend beckons you to join her up closer to the front. That might be a temptation, but it’s not an opportunity. Rude never is. Don’t do it.
Your financial adviser calls with an opportunity he thinks you can’t resist, but you have to act quickly. You don’t, and the stock market plunges the next day. Chalk that one up on the “opportunity lost” side, but in a good way. Breathe a sigh of relief.
Robert Frost came to a fork in the road, availed himself of the opportunity to take the road less traveled, and never quit sighing over the difference that choice made in his life. You might wonder where that other road led, but you’ll never know. He took his lost opportunity with him to the grave.
You’d have to be 100 years old to even vaguely remember this next one, but we all know the story. It’s 1912 and you’ve been offered an all-expense-paid berth on the Titanic’s maiden voyage. What an opportunity! Thank you, Oprah! (Okay, so the equivalent thereof.) Except you oversleep on the morning of the departure date and the ship sails without you.
Lost opportunity? It surely seemed so at the time, but it doubtless went down (no pun intended) in your own personal annals as the one that most fortunately got away.
Maybe you’ve heard about Old Opernockity, the last of the fine fiddle tuners. He lived on the peak of a treacherous mountain and plied his trade only one day a year before the stroke of midnight.
Clarence inherited a genuine but seriously out of tune Stradivarious, so he made his way up the mountain at great peril to his life, arriving somewhat after midnight.
The old fiddle tuner met the exhausted and gasping Clarence at the door. “Too late,” he said. “Go away. “Opernockity tunes but once.”
Do you believe that? Not the story itself, but the gist of its meaning. Do you believe that opportunity knocks only once?
Stay with me, now. We’re oozing over into the gray “eat your cake and have it too” hemisphere, but it’s not all that different from where we’ve been.
Let’s say it’s your birthday and your mom made you a great big chocolate birthday cake. Mmm, your favorite. Problem is, she also invited a bunch of kids to come help you eat it. The opportunity arises for you to gobble down every bit of that magnificent cake, so you do.
Not wise. You enjoyed the opportunity to eat the whole thing, but now you’d welcome the opportunity to no longer have it with you.
Opportunities are like that. You win some and you lose some.
I figure that’s pretty much the way Robert Frost felt too.
MARJORIE ANDERSON is an Edmond resident.
