It is strange how trivial and random the details that will change your life can be. It is one thing if a runaway truck or a hurtling meteor reorders your world, but entirely another when your existence is transformed by something as bizarrely out-of-place as a travel brochure left carelessly in a dentist’s office. I know my dentist could not have placed it there on purpose, he had not provided his patients with anything but outdated issues of the same three magazines in the twenty years that I had been his patient. Some other visitor must have been holding it in hand when the receptionist called, and idly set it down on the side table by the chair in which I would soon sit. Read more…