You ever have one of those epiphanies where it’s like “WHY didn’t anyone tell me this?”

I mean, I read the literature, I read the email chains, I see the movies and shows so…why hasn’t this come up?!

The other week I mentioned to you that my wife and I deserve Olympic Gold Medals for the fact that Dar has never gotten lost. He’s never run into the street. Our house is on a busy street. Remember, if he goes missing, he’ll never be able to tell anyone who he is or where he lives. He refuses to wear medic-alert bracelets or anything like that. (Tattoo? Thinking about it, but that’s not this week’s epiphany.)

Putting those Olympic words into this blog got me to thinking. Dar’s favorite place is the living room. Lately, Dar’s brother R has been hanging in the living room. Don’t get your hopes up for fraternal affection: R’s preferred video game only works in that room.

I was kinda hoping R would be a calming influence on Dar, because we’re not there every minute of every day, and Dar sometimes screams when left alone…but not really.

Our living room is right next to our front door.  The front door is dead bolted and regular-locked AND chain-locked. But every so often we forget our redundancies. Once or twice, Dar *might* have escaped, but luckily didn’t.

I have spun 100 scenarios in my head if Dar escapes. But until this week I never thought of this: how will it affect R? I mean, he’s 8. That’s old enough to remember, old enough to feel…massively guilty if Dar escaped from a room R was in…escaped and died.

It would be a little Owen Meany-like for R. Obviously the incident wouldn’t really be his fault, but…a lifetime of therapy might not be enough for that.

Or maybe it wouldn’t bother R at all! There’s always that possibility. Although then I have to worry if I’m raising the next We Need to Talk About Kevin, a sort of empathy-less void.

I realize this realization doesn’t really change my behavior much, or at all. It’s a bit like if you’ve already built the bunker for nuclear winter, and someone mentions that it might also come in handy against a pandemic. But still…now I’m worried about that pandemic.

That’s enough for this week. Don’t need to get to a thousand words when the first 400 have scared me that much.