Fork in the Road"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." -Yogi Berra. Every day we are faced with circumstances and with circumstances come the decisions we make in order to fulfill our lives and give it meaning. However, once we have made a decision, having crossed this “fork”, we must move forward, accepting what we have done, because what happened has happened and there is nothing we can do to change the past. This is the case of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" and Alistair MacLeod's short story "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood". While the character in Frost's poem knowingly faces a dilemma, in contrast, the narrator of MacLeod's story makes a decision without looking into the future. Everyone is a traveler, choosing which roads to follow on the map of their continuing journey, life. Robert Frost places his character on a divergent road, and he must make a decision on which one to take. The two roads are almost identical, but one is less busy. He looks ahead, but cannot see far, because of "the place where he is bent over in the undergrowth." Alistair MacLeod does it differently; the narrator has arrived at a crossroads, but without hesitation, he takes the path more traveled. This is the first contrast between the two literatures. “And both that morning lay equally in leaves that no foot had trodden in black.” the leaves had covered the ground and since they had fallen, no one had yet passed on this road. Maybe Frost does this because every time a person gets to the point where they have to make a choice, it's new to them, somewhere they've never been and they tend to feel that no one else has ever been there either. The character took the road less traveled. The path he chooses makes him the man he is. MacLeod makes his narrator take the other path; he brings the glass of water to John's mother without thinking about what awaits him. For Jenny, this had great meaning: it represents commitment. Like most young men, he takes the easy way out and gets what he wants, or at least he does. He has a son, loses his relationship with Jenny and carries the guilt of not having taken the right path before..