What might have been

Magnet #446 - Frank Lloyd Wright's Kentuck Knob

Good gravy - Kentuck Knob is only seven miles away from Fallingwater, in Western PA. Since I found out last night, I've wondering how we could have been in the neighborhood and not dropped by!

Instead, I think my sisters ended up getting me this when they went on their Pennsylvania rumspringa.

The Hagens had fallen in love with the Kaufmanns' house Fallingwater, and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build it - it would be one of the last he ever built. Indeed, it was 1953, and the guy was busy working on the Guggenheim at the time. And, dude was 86 years old!!!

I picked this magnet for today, because the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that had I paid more attention to Mrs. Misenheimer's long division lessons in 6th grade, that I might have been an architect in an alternate reality.

More than Kirk's space travel, or the Doctor's time travels, or Sam Beckett's quantum leaps, or Buffy's Angel, or even Prue's astral projections, the concept of alternate realities has always fascinated me. The very idea that every single decision made on a timeline sparks a new reality of possibilities is just mind-boggling.

I will say that I'm betting J.J. Abrams has been living and breathing alternative realities for a few years at least - what with a SpUhura'd Star Trek and a non-9/11'd Fringe, and, I guess if you want to get technical, you can probably throw a bit of LOST in there, as well. My thing is that if you bother to think about it for too long, and you basically freak yourself out wondering about all other yous running around.

But, I'm of the mind that no matter what decisions you've made, or wherever those life decisions have led to you live whatever life you're living now, it must the life that you should be living. Otherwise, you'd be off living that other life. Or that other life. Or that other, other life. See? Trippy.

Oddly, Lord Palumbo, the guy who ended up buying Kentuck Knob kinda sort of agrees with me when he said (about buying the house), "Life, on occasion, becomes a matter of serendipity. When circumstances conspire to propel one in a certain direction it is best to go with the flow, or so I have found, even if the precise destination is at the time unknown."