One recent night, I lay in bed tormented by an old memory. It wasn’t much of a memory. Just a dim recollection of a night 15 years ago in Waterville when a buddy and I cruised through a McDonald’s parking lot in search of action.

On one of many rounds though the lots, we met a pair of young ladies in another car. Like us, they had been prowling the torpid Waterville streets in search of adventure. Instead, they found us. Or maybe we found them. And therein lies the source of my recent insomnia.

Realization dawns now that mundane occurrences shaped my life. That chance meeting in a McDonald’s parking lot may be the very reason I’m sitting here now, pounding out a column for the daily newspaper for which I work.

Or maybe I’m being maudlin. It works out like this: This pair of young ladies followed my friend and me to a more private location. I found something in common with one of them, he with another. We sat in the dark for hours, getting acquainted. We drank beer and wine coolers. The night passed and we all went on to the various labors of impending morning.

But here’s the thing. I saw one of the young ladies again. We became friends and we dated a little. On and off, on and off through a year or more. She went off to college. I went on to harder times. She came back and we dated some more. And so it went.

At the time, I was a directionless misfit with no real prospects and none in sight. When my lady friend announced she was moving to Lewiston to take a teaching position, I announced that I would like to join her. We got an apartment, lived together a brief time and parted ways.

It was during this time that I found myself a directionless misfit again but now in a strange city. Without any real forethought, I answered an ad in the local newspaper in which freelance writers were being sought. An editor sent me out on assignment and I spent my last dollar on a notebook. The notebook lasted me through a second assignment and a third one after that.

I moved into a shabby apartment and worked for the paper whenever they had something for me to cover. I inched my way, bug-like, onto the police beat and spun a web there. For 12 years I’ve been living and working here and I’m generally quite happy – far happier than I was as that dreamy slacker probing a fast-food parking lot for sustenance like a beetle poking around an abandoned can. And yet the latter leads directly to the former.

If we had not met those girls by chance, how would I have ended up in Lewiston? If my hound-dog friend had decided to give up the hunt before one last probe of that parking lot, what would have become of me?

A chance meeting and here I am. Maybe if we’d prowled the lot at Burger King I would have ended up a rock star.

It chills me, this idea that the smallest circumstance can completely guide the course of an entire life. Some versions of string theory suggest that every possible outcome has occurred in other dimensions. In one of those dimensions, am I still down and out in Waterville because I never stumbled upon that young lady who would lead me blindly to Lewiston?

I am always horrified to read stories of seemingly mindless fate coming to bear on a person’s life. A woman is killed when a piece of concrete falls from an overpass and smashes through the windshield of her car. The odds against that happening are staggering. If the nice woman had stopped to tie her shoes before getting into her car, her life would have been spared. Had she paused to fix her hair in the rearview mirror, she would still be alive today.

It’s loosely called chaos theory and chaos is what it inspires. For if every minor choice you make in each moment of your existence might profoundly dictate your future, you could go mad thinking about it.

If I had gone for pizza rather than cheeseburgers for my 16th birthday, I might have ended up playing short stop in the major leagues. If I had gone to Old Orchard Beach instead of Reid State Park the day after graduation, I might have ended up a drug-addicted bank robber now dying in prison.

It troubles me because the future is completely malleable. If I write too long in this column, will it set off a chain of events leading to my doom? If I write a few paragraphs shorter, will I win a Pulitzer next year?

The trick, I suppose, is to cling to the old belief that all things happen for a reason and your entire life is foretold by fate. It’s very comforting because it takes randomness out of the equation.

But I can’t help mustering a little gratitude for that hedonistic spin through the long-ago parking lot and the events that unfolded. Because the most frightening thought for me is that, had it not happened that way, I might have remained utterly inert. I might still be prowling the night streets of Waterville and dreaming of better days.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. He’s been humming “Melancholy Baby” lately.

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