The theme of this prose contest, "The Path Not Taken," invited authors to explore the profound, often whispered, question of "What if?" It's a theme rooted in one of the most powerful forces in human experience: choice and the inevitable, lingering presence of its consequences. Both fiction and creative nonfiction authors submitted their best.
Scroll down to read the stories of our prize winners.
I saw him in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Watched him drive in and park but leave his Lexus idling in the spring heat, and I wondered if his reason for not immediately exiting the vehicle was the same as mine, a bit of social anxiety, maybe the need to listen to one more lilting classical piece while the over-stimulation of the day had a chance to ooze down his shoulder blades and onto the floorboards. But no. I watched him perform the time-honored ritual of loosening and removing his tie. Women have their own ritual, but I still had hours to go before I could pop open the tight binding around my chest and relieve my aching back muscles.
He was definitely my type. I mean, not the type that usually pursued me, not the ball-cap-wearing, gone-five-days-out-of-seven-driving-truck type. This gentleman, though older, maybe five to ten years my senior, was still agile and fit, apparent as he emerged from his car and stepped to his trunk to retrieve his tote bags. His suit fit well but wasn’t flashy, and on his wrist I recognized the brand of sports watch I used to wear when there was still time and energy in my life to be a runner.
I assessed my own outfit and sighed. No glamor here. The sweater I’d donned in the cold morning air of the mountain had become rumpled in the course of the day with humidity, perspiration, and tears. My pantlegs were frayed at the bottoms because I refused to wear heels, and they were too long for my sensible shoes. I hadn’t done my nails in… weeks? Wait—when was Christmas? Okay, maybe three months. No, four.
Watching the nicely dressed, neatly coiffed, gracefully ambulating man disappear through the sliding doors of TJ’s, I felt again that deep pang of what might have been.
What kind of vehicle would I be driving had I stayed in law school? Let’s be honest, I was born without the gene for shopping, so my clothes wouldn’t be much different. Maybe a much better quality. Definitely a better quality. Newer shoes, for sure. My nails would certainly be done. But I’d still be driving a truck, probably a big new Ram instead of my little used Ranger. Not probably. Absolutely.
My boys used to speculate about what kind of car “we” would have after I graduated. Ezra would have loved a Lexus. Sam wanted an SUV, something big enough to fit all the boys on his basketball team. The girls didn’t have an opinion either way. They just wanted to be able to go clothes shopping without a budget. Imagine that. I did imagine it for them, often.
I’m sure that’s part of what swayed me to take the Law School Admissions Test in my senior year as an undergrad. I wanted to give my kids all the things they’d been denied for the years I’d been in school, the years we’d lived at the poverty level because their father, a certified sociopath (ask the therapist he briefly employed in order to coerce me into staying with him), refused to pay child support. After adopting three special needs kids. After it being his idea in the first place (but yes, I wholeheartedly agreed to the first, then the second, then the third, and have not regretted it, not one minute, in all these years because the love of those children saved me). But also, I applied to law school to try to fulfill a dream of my father’s. He earned his GED in the army, then became a cop, then moved to California with my mother and, while working security at night, attended law school during the day, landing a job with the IRS when he finished. Which is just about the time he was diagnosed with the rare terminal illness that killed him two years later. He had a vision for our family that never materialized. I thought I could simply take over and make it happen.
But I had—what does Dr. Phil call it? A defining moment—toward the end of my first semester of law school. And let me just interject here—I loved law school. Loved it. I am a reader and a writer, and I am extremely analytical (as demonstrated by my LSAT scores). Ergo, reading case law and writing memoranda was my vibe, and I was good enough to earn high grades and high praise from my professors. One problem, though; I never saw my kids. I mean, yeah, I saw them. I watched them eat dinner while my mind fretted over the pages and pages of case law I had to study each night, and I chased them around in the morning, pleading with them to find their shoes and make their lunches so we could, for once, leave for school on time. But I didn’t play monopoly with them or bike ride with them or cart them to 5Ks and run with them as I once had. I locked myself in my room in the evenings while they bickered over which television shows to watch, and I studied. Until that one evening when I heard a noise at my door. I opened it, and there sat Sam, his eight-year-old body slumped against the doorway.
“I was going to ask you to play with me but you’re studying so I’m gonna sit here and wait for you to be done,” he said.
Maybe this doesn’t make you tear up. You don’t know Sam, so you can’t picture his upturned sweet boy face gazing at me with those enormous brown eyes. I told him I’d be out in ten minutes to play with him. Then I shut the door so he wouldn’t hear me while I sobbed. My children were abandoned by their father long before we ever moved out. In that moment, I realized I was essentially doing the same thing. So I closed my books, along with a much beloved chapter of my life, and went out to join my son.
I had realized quickly after my divorce I wouldn’t be able to house, feed, clothe, and school supply four kids on a minimum wage job. (Try filling out a resume after a decade spent as a stay-at-home mom. Strengths: Not fainting at the sight of blood. Weaknesses: Needing time off every time someone is bleeding or barfing or sneezing.) Considering my job skills, I decided to return to school and get a teaching credential. As mentioned, I fell prey to some hubris and detoured into law school. Back on the original career pathway, I earned my credential and landed a job teaching high school. Once again, I had time to attend Ezra’s track meets, Sam’s basketball games, Nic’s theater productions, and Joanna’s IEP meetings.
Then the unexpected happened: I fell in love. Not with a man. With my job.
I hadn’t expected to. I loved my own passel of unruly hooligans, but I didn’t expect to love other people’s hooligans as much as I did, but boy, did I. The innocent ninth graders, fresh from surviving middle school, the arrogant seniors who believed they were smarter than any of us—I loved all of them.
Teaching meant driving a used car. And shopping at Target. And renting instead of buying. But it also meant offering a safe classroom to students who identified as LGBTQ. Opening my room early on dark, rainy mornings for the kiddos who were dropped off by working parents. And so many precious moments….
Such as the one that had resulted in my needing a moment in my truck before walking into Trader Joe’s, the one that had left those tears on my sweater. Ryan, one of my rowdiest ninth-grade babies, had come back to visit. As a freshman, he was so naughty I developed a fond friendship with his mom as we exchanged parenting stories every time I had to call her. As a senior, he stopped by one day, waved, and disappeared. This day, though, months after his graduation, he walked into my classroom wearing his Marine Corps uniform.
“I almost left boot camp,” he told me. “But I decided to try to make it to the end. And I did.”
“Of course you did,” I told him. “I’m absolutely proud of you for hanging in there.” As for myself, I could barely hang in there until he left. When the room fell quiet after his exit, I wept. Tall, strong, and dignified now, he would serve us all well.
Friends have told me before that finding love is as easy as “accidently” bumping into someone at Trader Joe’s. By the time I had smoothed out my sweater and gathered my tote bags, the silver fox had loaded his trunk and driven off.
Maybe I’d see him another day. Or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. In a good way, I mean.
I met Russell in Pittsburgh in the late 1980s, back when I was a young sportswriter covering everything from college basketball to the still-new Arena Football League. He had just signed with the AFL’s Pittsburgh Gladiators after not making the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons roster, and the city buzzed about this tall, handsome, confident defensive back who moved like he still had something to prove. I wanted the exclusive, and in true rookie-with-something-to-prove fashion, I badgered him until he arrived from his home in Maryland. The minute we met, the connection was instant. We started dating quietly, slipping into an under-the-radar romance that felt both spontaneous and inevitable.
Back then, Russell could hear me smile over the phone. He still can. It was one of his superpowers, the way he tuned into me, even long-distance. When I left Pittsburgh for my next job in Dallas in 1989, we stayed connected with the kind of intensity only long-distance couples in their twenties can sustain. By the time I moved home to Los Angeles in 1991 to cover the Lakers, I thought he might be the man I’d eventually marry.
But the truth was already beginning to show in small, almost throwaway moments.
Long before Los Angeles, when I still lived in Pittsburgh, I told Russell I wanted to go to Cancun. He wouldn’t go. No real reason, just… no. So, his eldest brother Eric, whom I adored, went with me instead. Eric and I had a ball. I can still see Eric’s face from a night at a limbo contest, laughing like a kid. He bent back under the stick with arms stretched wide, the happiest I’d ever seen him – and his family said so too when they saw the photograph I captured. I knew then that I wanted to be part of that family. What I didn’t know then was that Russell’s reluctance to travel, to try, to stretch into the unknown, would eventually collide with the freedom I craved.
A few years after Cancun, after my two-year stint in Dallas and now working in LA, Russell prepared to graduate from law school. I organized a celebratory trip in Bermuda because a friend, an editor at Sports Illustrated, had married there, and raved about the locale. Russell and I tossed around the idea of getting married there too, in that dreamy, impulsive way couples do when they’re in love but unsure of the details. My colleague connected me to the official who could arrange the paperwork. I tucked away the contact information, imagining a future I wasn’t fully convinced I wanted.
When the trip rolled around, the first warning sign came before either of us left the United States. During my layover, I called him to check in and casually asked if he had his passport.
“I didn’t know I needed one,” he said.
I remember staring at the airport phone, stunned. Bermuda was not a domestic flight. He was about to leave his home and head to the airport without a passport for an international trip. I sprang into action. I called everyone I knew, including that wedding contact, and somehow—through pure force of will—got him cleared into Bermuda. Even at twenty-nine, I could already feel the imbalance: I was moving mountains; he was simply moving.
Once we arrived, the differences grew sharper. Like most tourists, we rented scooters. Russell drove fast—recklessly so. He hit a bump, we went flying, skidded across the pavement. He popped up laughing because, as a former football player, he was accustomed to injury. I wasn’t. My jacket torn. My elbow bruised. He barely registered my fear. I wanted comfort. I got, “You’re fine.”
Still, I tucked these moments away, convincing myself this was just part of discovering each other.
A year later, when the Lakers played the Washington Bullets, I was booked in a posh hotel in D.C., as I often did for comfort during those grueling five-games-in-seven-nights East Coast swings. Russell came to see me between my work obligations, and we ordered room service lunch together. I asked for guacamole—standard California girl behavior. He looked genuinely puzzled.
“I don’t eat guacamole,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I’ve never had it.”
I stared at him, stunned in the same way I had been during that airport phone call. It wasn’t about the guacamole. It was about curiosity. It was about hunger—for life, for experience, for the new, the unfamiliar. I had been traveling the world for years by then. Before covering the Lakers, I had been the national college basketball and tennis writer for The Dallas Morning News, covering Wimbledon twice and vacationing solo in Paris, Florence, and Greece. My passport was not just a booklet; it was a promise. My life was growing bigger with every assignment, every flight, every taste of somewhere else.
And here was a man I loved, who loved me back, who could hear me smile through a phone line—yet lived in a world bordered by comfort, caution, and routine.
If ever there was a moment when clarity hit me like a door slamming shut, it was during that lunch. Back then, I mistook his steadiness for my future instead of noticing how much I was already outgrowing the edges of our world. I didn’t end things that afternoon, but the truth had already settled in: We were headed in different directions, and only one of us was willing to turn the wheel.
There was another layer, too, one I couldn’t ignore even in my romantic haze. Russell was deeply rooted in Maryland, entwined with his family in a way that was beautiful but also binding. I loved how close they were. I loved how they loved me. His mother, his brothers, his sister—they embraced me fully. But I could feel the expectation hovering, unspoken but unmistakable: if this became marriage, I would be the one to move. And not just geographically.
During that period, while covering sports, I became friendly with George Solomon, then the sports editor at The Washington Post. George admired my work. He told me once, very candidly, that he would never hire me because married female sportswriters didn’t want to travel. Even as he said it with affection, I felt the sting. His assumption wasn’t about me. It was about what marriage—particularly to a man like Russell—could mean for my future.
Professional travel wasn’t simply part of my job; it was part of my identity. And I could feel, in my bones, that the life waiting for me in Maryland would require shrinking myself. Becoming smaller. Choosing stillness over motion. Choosing safety over curiosity. Choosing a path that would never have led to Italy, where I eventually lived. A path that would never have led to working for national media outlets, to living in Italy, to Napa Valley, to reinvention, to the woman I ultimately became.
Because here is the truth I didn’t yet know at twenty-nine: sometimes the path not taken isn’t a lost dream, but a closed door that saves your future self.
Russell and I never had a dramatic breakup. There were no slammed doors, no ultimatums, no betrayal. We simply drifted into the reality we had both been avoiding. The phone calls became less frequent. The visits more strained. The space between us, once electric, turned into something quiet, heavy, resigned. We stopped keeping up the charade.
Even now, decades later, we are still friends. He is still confident, still charming, still the same man I once imagined a life with. He didn’t grow in the ways I did, and that’s not a flaw. It’s simply who he is. But I soared. I reinvented. I stepped into the world with hunger and audacity. I moved to Italy. I built a life that twisted and expanded in ways twenty-nine-year-old me could not have imagined.
We looked extraordinary together, Russell and I—him at six-foot-five, muscular and carved from the years he spent playing football, and me at six-foot-one, model-sleek, both chocolate brown with megawatt smiles. Strangers stopped us everywhere we went to tell us how gorgeous we were together. But beauty was never the point. Beauty could not carry a marriage. Beauty could not carry me into the life I was meant to live.
Sometimes I imagine that alternate life—the one where I married him in Bermuda or settled in Maryland, becoming the wife of a lawyer who preferred familiar routines over adventure. I try to picture the version of me who would have chosen that path. She is kind, warm, loyal. She is loved by his family. But her world is small. Her horizons low. Her wings folded neatly at her sides. Her cage door shut.
And every time I imagine her, I feel gratitude wash over me.
Because the path I took—the uncertain one, the risky one, the wide, unpaved one—led me to myself. And the road I’m on now has no end in sight.
It was a hot August day in 1998. I was sitting on the edge of a backyard pool in Randolph, a suburb forty minutes south of Boston. My best friend Pat was relaxing on a big floating lounge, a chilled glass of white wine in her hand. I stared at her.
“I want to have another baby.” I said, matter-of-factly. Pat kept her lounging position, lifted her head, turned to face me and said, “Are you fucking out of your mind? You’re not even divorced, you’re working full time, in court every other week, and you barely sleep now!”
I frowned. For the last fifteen years, Pat had always been my sounding board, my calm port in the storm that was my life. But she was looking at this all wrong. I countered, “I love kids." I loved being pregnant. Not everyone can say that. I had easy pregnancies, easy deliveries, and I made enough money. "Besides,” I said, gearing up to tell her the biggest reason that this plan was so very important to me, “the ex said he’d keep this fight going until I was too old to have another baby...and I’m almost there. I can’t let him win.”
To this Pat tilted her head. She laughed. Getting a victory in the horrific game that had become my disentanglement from my marriage was something she could get behind. “You know I’ll support you in any crazy thing you decide to do,” she replied. “We both know I’ve done a few crazy things of my own.” She had, indeed.
Five months earlier I had taken a three day trip from Long Island to San Francisco, to take a board review course. I was almost a year into my first job as an attending obstetrician and gynecologist and I needed to get Board-Certified. Being in the middle of a contentious divorce with a five year old and an eight year old hardly left any time to study. And although the last word I would use to describe my hopefully soon-to-be ex was "cooperative," he did take the kids for that weekend so I could get my board review done. The course ran all day for three days, with sample questions at the end. My flight home was on a Sunday red-eye, so after the last questions were done I headed out to have some dinner before going to the airport.
I found a small jazz club on the water with Sunday happy hour dinner specials and parked myself at the bar, my weekend duffle underneath my seat. I contemplated my life while listening to some smooth jazz sounds and ordered salmon. I had two adorable kids, a job I loved, and a husband who didn’t believe there was such a thing as falling out of love. Of course if he had been more supportive, less clueless, and, honestly, if I had more patience and understanding, maybe things would be different. But now they were just combative. I was looking forward to going home to the kids, but not to the continued battles. I looked up at the bartender, who was about to place a second glass in front of me and I said, “Sure. I’ll have another glass of wine.” The bartender, about my age, with a moustache and a San Francisco Giants T-shirt, said, “Good thing, since this one is from that man over there,” gesturing to a table near the band.
A man was sitting alone, with a plate of half-finished food in front of him. I can only describe him as a “cool professor kind-of hippy” guy. Aviator glasses and a goatee, a worn brown leather jacket. He smiled at me but did not come over. “Thanks,” I mouthed in his direction, and I likely blushed a bit. When was the last time a man—any man—paid attention to me for something that didn’t involve a report card or a little league game? I had a bit of time before my flight, so I walked over to his table. He asked me to sit down and I did. We talked a bit. Our lives seemed pretty similar; both in the middle of a divorce, both of us had two kids. The divorces were similarly contentious, and neither was final. We commiserated for about an hour and then it was time for me to go. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and I called a cab. And that—so I thought—was that.
To my surprise, this man called me, and sent me an actual hand-written letter. We even made contact on what was the very beginning of internet chatting; instant messaging and chat rooms were just starting to appear and we tried them out. We visited each other on our childless weekends, and by the summer, I started to formulate a plan that made perfect sense to me. This relationship was nice—this man was nice—but we were geographically incompatible. I could not move across the country and neither could he. But that would not have to mean we could not consider bringing a baby into the picture while I was still young enough. To me, it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the world I was sure it would seem crazy, but I didn’t care. I discussed this possibility with him, asking, “Have you ever thought about having more kids?” To which he answered, correctly, “I would have loved to but once my marriage crashed I just thought that would never happen.” We decided together to let nature decide.
My conversation with Pat in the pool was not my asking for her permission. If the guy was in, and I could arrange the rest (I was an Ob/Gyn; I certainly knew how to increase my odds of success) I was merely letting her in on my plan.
Two months later I missed my period. My divorce became final and so did his. And nine months later I had another son, after an easy pregnancy and an easier delivery. I now had an almost-nine-year-old, a six-year-old, a newborn, a full time job, a nanny, a loving but geographically limited partner, and a lot of skeptics.
That was twenty-six years ago. I have now been married to that guy for twenty-three years, and have lived in California for fifteen. All five children are adults and we have four grandchildren. The youngest always loved to tease the others, saying “I’m the only one whose parents are still married.” They were not amused.
I love my life.
But sometimes I wonder...what would have happened if I didn’t decide to take a board review class all the way across the country? What if I never set foot in that club? What if I never went over to talk to him? What on earth would my life be like? What would it be like now?
I feel like once I left Long Island, all those years ago, I never looked back. I never thought it would be hard, since I was always going toward something. But I have imagined what I would have done if I returned home from that review class, went back to my job, my life and the endless fighting. Before I went to that course, I had started to feel that the difficulties of single-parenting and full-time doctoring were becoming incompatible. I remember I was starting to feel isolated, depressed and overwhelmed. I somehow felt my opinions and interests weren’t the same as my local neighbors or friends that I made through work or my children’s activities. Had I never entered that jazz club and never accepted that second glass of wine, I might be still there, on the east coast, now an empty nester, afraid to move too far from my two adult children and my grandchildren, accepting the limits that living there would place on me.
I recently had this vision confirmed. A few weeks ago, while sitting in my living room on election night, I saw the excitement of a wave of new leadership taking place in many eastern states. Progressive governors were elected in New Jersey and Virginia; a Democratic Socialist mayor in New York City. In California, my beliefs fit comfortably within the political landscape. But I then viewed the political map of Long Island and I saw that the town where I used to live, and all the neighboring towns, to the east and west, voted soundly in the opposite direction. I had a reflexive visceral feeling in the pit of my stomach: I knew that this guy, and this life, had saved me from a place that never really was and never really would have been, my home. I am grateful.
Souls meet Fate once. Mine met Fate twice.
The first time, Fate waited in the Philippine jungle, leaning against a jeepney painted like a circus wagon, cigarette dangling, watching me chase a World War II treasure wrapped in vines and war crimes. The second time, he idled outside my house when my body betrayed me. Both times, I waved Fate off. A cave and a tomb, separated by three decades, were pulled toward the same shimmering green time portal that cracked open on April 7th, 2025.
I pictured Fate’s crossroad would look like a Twilight Zone set. Two lonely roads intersecting in a wasteland, and Rod Serling narrating from the shadowy tip of reality. “Every choice is a wager. “He’d say. “You think you’re choosing jobs, lovers, cities, gods. But really, it’s life or Fate.” Gravel crunches under his steps. “Each skipped breakfast. Each ignored lump… is a chip you place on the table. You see, Fate’s jeepney doesn’t wait at crossroads. He cruises. Slow. Patient. Meter always running. You don’t hail Fate. He finds you.” And when he pulls up, the ride you take, or refuse, becomes the story of your life.
The choices I didn’t make saved me. If you really want to hear about a path not taken and the lingering presence of its consequences, forget neat little maps. The first thing you’ll need to know is why a Marine, retired cop, yoga-bending, author, and podcaster would end up in the ICU with a paralyzed right side and a brain that took a coffee break. I want to talk about two rides with Fate I chose not to take that lead back to each other in one surreal moment April 7th, 2025. The second begins in a hospital bed with tubes in my arm and my wife, Beth, holding my hand like it was the last warm thing on Earth.
So, where were you Labor Day 2023?
Stroke strikes. I’d just made breakfast for the family when Fate rolled up. Out back, I’m wiping down my new barbecue like it’s a Harley. Life was good. Daughter getting married. Podcast humming. Book selling. Retired after four decades chasing monsters. I should’ve known better. The gods send Fate when you smile too long.
My body went rogue, tossed in Fate’s back seat like a passenger who’d already clocked out. I tried to say “Beth.” My mouth betrayed me.
Dizziness was Fate jerking the wheel. And then the worst part. Names and memories were slipping away. Whole chapters of my life erased like chalk in the rain.
People ask, Were you scared? No. Fear was too small for this ride. I was furious that my body sold me out when my family needed me most.
But Fate made a big mistake. He didn’t shut the door. And when the jeepney ride to oblivion slowed, I bailed out.
I’d seen stroke in other men. The bastard. The silent thief of bearings. I recognized the warning signs. I didn’t play tough. I pointed, I grunted, I got in my car. Beth drove like a bat out of hell and thank God she did. Kaiser’s stroke team was waiting. They hit me with the meds, the scans, the wires, the works.
And then came a long quiet night in a hospital bed.
Beth and I in the ICU. Machines humming like lullabies for the damned. My right side was dead weight. My words were prisoners. But my eyes still worked. I looked at her. She looked at me. Thirty-four years since that Marine Corps Ball blind date. Thirty-four years of the Corps, cops, and kids. I swear to God, I laughed. “I can’t believe I had a fucking stroke,” I said like a toddler telling a joke. But Beth got it. She always gets it.
Pale lights buzzed in the hall. Tubes trailed from my arms like puppet strings. Rod Serling appeared in the ICU as grave as Jacob Marley to Scrooge, “What if you had ignored the signs? What if you had stayed in bed? Your daughter’s wedding becomes your funeral. Your stories end mid-sentence. Your grandchildren never hear your voice."
I made a promise to Serling’s ghost. If I pull myself together, I’d return to a volcano’s crater.
Mount Pinatubo waits.
***
It had been over thirty years. June 15, 1991, I was a Marine stationed on Luzon, where fate put me on a path to an epic adventure. I was on jungle patrol, half-dead from heat and boredom, when I met a machete-slinging Filipino. He talked like a man who’d seen too much and slept too little. He told me about the Golden Lily treasure. Locally known as World War II loot buried by Japanese soldiers near the top of Mount Pinatubo.
So naturally, I said hell yes. We bounced away in a jeepney (Filipino version of a taxi). We hit the boonies where the trees whisper in Tagalog and the mud eats your feet. We hiked toward Pinatubo’s summit, chasing a fortune looted in blood.
I won’t bore you with the machete man’s rock-reading boogity, boogity. The Japanese, with their delicate cruelty, had a penchant for lacing treasure troves with booby-traps and sealing their plunder in camouflaged tombs of cement and stone.
But we stumbled across a cave. It wasn’t triumph that hit me, but a shiver. The jungle sealed the mouth like a bullet wound. I felt the silence of the dead who slaved to build it. And there, in the stillness, I caught the perfume of my soul. That elusive scent of everything I’d ever hoped entwined with everything I’d dared to dream.
Problem was, we needed to keep our mouths shut and recruit some muscle to help us excavate the rubble. And staying alive in the boonies was like trying to hold onto a greased pig in a monsoon. None of this mattered.
Because a couple days later, I was back on jungle patrol, filthy and trying to persuade a couple grunts to help recover the fortune, when Pinatubo decided to go full Vesuvius. The mountain exploded like it had been holding its breath for a thousand years. Five hundred feet of Pinatubo’s peak blew twenty-two miles into the atmosphere. There went my treasure like a bad cosmic joke. Fate drove by up there. I didn’t get in.
***
Where were you April 6, 2025?
It had been 580 days since I made a promise to the ghost of Rod Serling from my hospital bed. I fought. I wanted to live again. To write again. So, I did. One uncertain step. Then another. I didn’t think. I endured.
My path came full circle April 6, 2025. I stood at Pinatubo’s rim. Stroke behind me, volcano before me. Two rides with Fate I refused.
I look across the majestic emerald lake the eruption left behind. In Tagalog, Pinatubo means “To grow.” Such perspective. I’ve pinpointed the exact decision I made and imagine the short life I would have if I had chosen differently. What if I squeezed through that cave opening so many years ago? My thin yellow flashlight beam lit the treasure chamber. The beam glowed like a full moon over a giant gold Buddha.
The sun’s orange light broke the blackness. The walls of the entire chamber were reinforced to the ceiling with red-lacquer wooden doors stolen from the Forbidden City. I see the bones of the cave builders who died with this secret. Skulls tilted toward the Buddha as if forced to worship their fate.
Fate had revealed the infamous Golden Lily Treasure. My eyes adjust to heaps of silver and gold pieces in straw baskets. Jewels and gems basked in daylight for the first time in decades. The flashlight’s thin beam crosses Rod Serling watching over the fortune from the back of the cave. He steps forward and shows young me a headline: “Marine Lost in Eruption.” He shows me children unborn, stories unwritten, a life erased before it began.
Then, without warning, Mount Pinatubo becomes the largest volcanic eruption in one hundred years. I’m killed along with 800 people. Its summit explodes 26 miles into the atmosphere. Pyroclastic flows jettison to the sea.
Today, I think of the short life that would have come if I had chosen differently. My life turned back on itself. Two choices not taken. One day, my grandchildren will ask, “Tell me a story, Pops?” And I will smile, knowing the cop stories can wait until they are older, when they can bear the weight of them.
Instead, I will tell them a story about how life is a treasure hunt. Not the kind marked on maps with red X’s, nor the kind sealed in caves with gold Buddhas and lacquered doors. No, the treasure is hidden in plain sight. Every fortune we seek in things fades, but the people we meet along the way shine brighter than any jewel.
A semi-biographical account of a distant ancestor based on the compilation of previously unknown archival material from Georgia, Germany, and the USA.
They call me David George now. Chemist. Dairy specialist. American citizen. I live on the quiet edge of New York, where snow hushes the land and trains whistle through the dark, like distant memories. But when the wind howls off the Great Lakes and rattles my windows, I am no longer David. I am Amerky “Beko” Georgidse again - standing at the edge of a February in 1921, staring down a road I did not take.
I was born in 1896, in the highlands of Georgia, into a family of land-owning peasants. My parents gave me the gift of education, and I devoured it - first in Kutais, then in Moscow and Petrograd. But revolution twice interrupted my studies, and I returned to a homeland newly unshackled, fragile, and burning with hope. In 1919, I was granted scholarships by our fledgling republic, though they were more than academic. They were a cover for political missions, a “student alibi,” as we called it. I spoke eight languages, not for prestige, but because in the Caucasus, survival often depended on the right word in the right tongue.
By twenty-five, I was a Private Secretary to the Chairman of our National Council. Georgia tasted freedom for three brief years. Then came February. The Bolsheviks descended, cloaked in false promises, and brought the Red Army’s wrath upon our capital. Tiflis reeked of gunpowder and despair. The dream of independence was dying again. Every man I respected, every voice I admired, was facing the same impossible choice: To stay and die for Georgia, and be remembered as a footnote in a lost cause, or to cross the border and live for her, fight for her from abroad?
I chose exile.
I sold my family’s last jewels to fund my escape. I left behind the village of my birth, the future I had sworn to build. In Berlin, I studied agriculture at Humboldt University. In 1924, I sailed to America as a cook’s assistant, scrubbing pans and peeling potatoes to earn my passage and master the English that would become my shield.
I buried Beko Georgidse in the soil of survival and built David George from his bones.
The fire that once fueled my political fervor now powered my scientific precision. At Ohio State University, I earned a postgraduate degree in Dairy Technology. I sterilized creamery equipment with the same rigor I once applied to drafting state documents for the Republic of Georgia. I spoke of milk fat with the same conviction I once reserved for the independence of my home country.
But the man I might have been - the Ghost Beko - never left me. He is the shadow that falls across my passport photo and lingers in the silence between sentences. He is the patriot who, like many others, died in a Cheka prison cell or froze in a Siberian labor camp. He is the alternate ending etched into my soul.
When I speak out in the American press - and I do so often, warning them of the insidious poison of Communism, - I am not just David George, the chemist, I am the Ghost Beko, screaming from the silenced trenches of Georgia. My words are my resistance. My life is a vigil.
This quite success in New York is defined by what it is not. It is not my home. It is not the future I fought for. Every degree I earned, every language I spoke, every dollar I saved, every American or German citizen I met served as a link in a chain, ensuring that the idea of a free Georgia remained alive in the world’s conscience. We, the émigrés of 1921, were not cowards! We traded the glorious, immediate end for the long, quiet burden of survival, carrying Georgia's memory in our bones and a handful of Georgian burial soil that we kept in our pockets, should we have died on this land of opportunities, the land that was not ours. We fought for Georgia, ensuring that our country’s pursuit of freedom, though blocked by the Russian invasion, was not forgotten by the world.
The path not taken is not a road I regret avoiding. It is the foundation of the man I became.
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