Copyright William Hammett 2012, 2015, 2022
Norma
Whitehead of Surrey, England was obsessive-compulsive. She was compelled
to touch every doorknob she passed. She was equally compelled to wash her
hands after touching each of the knobs. She daily checked every picture
in her home to make sure it was straight since passing trucks on the street had
a tendency to shake the house a bit. She couldn't pass a table without
swiping her index finger along its edge to make sure that it was free of
dust. For Norma, life was comprised of an endless series of chores
consisting of maintaining order, balance, and equilibrium in her
universe. Her husband Henry suggested that she take Prozac, but Norma
didn't want chemicals sluicing through her veins. Besides, she didn't
mind the disorder. She felt that more people needed to pay attention to
the smaller things in life.
Norma and Henry were sitting and watching television on a Tuesday evening
when her life changed forever. The couple sat on their living room
couch, which was exactly ten-feet-five-inches away from the TV screen
since she'd read an article in the Guardian that claimed
this was the perfect distance to avoid harmful radiation from the TV's cathode
ray tube. It was also the perfect distance to maintain proper eye
health. Sitting too close to the screen exposed the eye to far too much
brightness. Sitting too far away caused eye strain.
The event sounded like a small explosion. There was smoke and debris, and
Norma and Henry climbed from the floor to see a gaping hole above them. A
small meteorite had slammed through the roof and ceiling and knocked Norma
unconscious for a full minute. She seemed perfectly fine, however, when
the neighbors showed up at the front door to see what all the fuss was about.
"It's nothing," Norma explained as she picked up broken objects
from the living room floor. "Just a meteorite."
Henry was perplexed. Norma was handling the debris--there was a lot of
powder and dirt on the floor--without worrying about getting her hands
dirty. From that night on, she lived a life free of OCD. A doctor
subsequently told her that the knock on her noggin had changed the
electrical currents in her brain, which had, for all intents and purposes, been
cosmically rewired. The meteorite had been a prescription from heaven.
Norma also had a changed mindset. If one couldn't guard against something
as dramatic as being hit by a meteorite--what were the odds?--there wasn't much
reason to worry about things a lot less important, like whether pictures are
plumb or tables are free of dust. "Life just has to happen,"
Norma told a local reporter. "You've got to go with the flow.
As Hamlet said, there's providence in the fall of a sparrow. Or a
meteorite."
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