Looking Out: Anyone, not just superheroes, can have superpowers
Have you ever noticed in movies and TV shows that the superhero always has exactly the right superpower to annihilate the challenge?
This is true whether the protagonist is a mild-mannered reporter who can fly or a detective whose logical brain is perfectly aligned with the clues presented.
Fiction?
Certainly, but it is also true that in real life, chance being chance and probabilities being probabilities, these things happen.
A person falls down and suffers a bad injury. The first person on the scene is an emergency room doctor. The IRS agent shows up at the door just as the mail carrier delivers a check for your inheritance from a great-aunt you didn’t even know. That happens all the time.
Your bathroom sink plugs but your brother-in-law is visiting. He’s a plumber so you don’t have to buy a new house.
Or a circus performer you know is gored by an elephant, taken to the hospital with a big hole in his chest. The ER doctor who treats him previously practiced in Pamplona, Spain. That is where fools from all over the world run through the narrow streets being chased, speared and trampled by bulls. Where the most preferred birthday presents are undoubtedly running shoes.
Fortunately for the elephant guy who walks out of the hospital 10 days later with a smile on his face, the doctor is a tusk-through-the-chest specialist.
Because I have the good fortune to live in a college town populated by brilliant academicians, I’ve experienced a few happy coincidences. Like the time a friend in Arizona sent me a strange nighttime infrared trail-cam photo of javelinas with an other-worldly cloud in one corner.
“What is it?” asked my friend.
I quickly forwarded the photo to some scientist friends. Within hours the alien smear in the photo was not only identified as a bat but based on the spacing of 2 1/2 wingbeats and the film speed of the camera, the species of bat was narrowed down to one of two out of 1,300 species on earth.
The same Arizona friend sent a photo of two poker machines in a casino, side by side — with essentially identical hands — four 9’s and an ace — achieved on simultaneous pulls of the lever. One hand was his and the other his friend’s.
“What are the odds?”
A few minutes later, a mathematics professor who specializes in gaming provided the answer: 1 in 2.93 billion.
“An impressively rare occurrence,” he said.
Once, even I had the opportunity to be a superhero. My beloved wife, Marsha, and were living in a town with horribly smelly sulfur water. One drizzly day while driving on a nearby expressway, I spotted an elderly man parked on the shoulder with his hood open. He was standing in front of his car holding a raincoat spread out at arm’s length, creased to provide a funnel into his radiator. I pulled over and reversed to where he was standing.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My car overheated. I’m trying to refill the radiator,” he said as we watched a tiny trickle of water drip-drip-dripping into the fill-tube.“Perhaps I can help,” I said. I opened my trunk to reveal 30 one-gallon jugs of good drinking water I had just filled at my brother’s home.
Coincidentally, today I was recipient of an uplifting gift. The day dawned hot, muggy and sunny. It is the kind of day that lowers the chance of survival and brings my spirits as low as a wagon rut in Death Valley. My daughter sent me a photo of a handprint “drawing” made by my 3-year-old, perfect, superhero granddaughter.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Anyone can have superpowers
