The way things could be lost

"She has just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio. She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening. It was more than concern she felt, it was horror to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance."

(Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship..., "Post and Beam", p.192)