A Little Bit of Luck by Hannah Rowan #RomanceGems

 “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from,” according to novelist Cormac McCarthy.  While the Dalai Lama says that “sometimes not getting what we want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

I’m not sure I agree with either of them.

I can’t say I wanted anything except to get home for dinner after a day of college classes when a tractor trailer popped into the driver’s side door of my VW Beetle, picked me up, and carried me down the interstate highway. It was one of those moments when time slowed to a crawl. Hmm…there’s a truck in my window.  I climbed over the gear shift and into the passenger seat, inexplicably still holding the steering wheel as though I thought it would help the situation. Eventually my car bounced off the truck’s grill, spun across a few lanes, and landed in the median facing the opposite direction.

I was surely lucky that day, although I was really annoyed that I’d just spent several hundred dollars putting a new motor in the car and now it was totaled. I didn’t have any injury except mild hysteria. And the insurance money financed my first trip to Disney.

Sometimes I wonder how I made it to the age where I was old enough to drive a car.

As a curious child, I inserted a metal wire into an electrical outlet just to see what would happen. What happened? A jolt that felt like the pins and needles you get when a limb goes to sleep magnified a few thousand times as I was catapulted across the room. But no permanent damage that I’m aware of. I guess I was lucky.

Undeterred, I was playing by an empty warehouse that had a slanted driveway leading to the underground garage door. The driveway was filled with water, and I’m still not sure what happened except that when I touched a pipe, I felt that now-familiar jolt of electrical energy. Lucky again.

There were so many things I did growing up that, looking back, I marvel that I survived. Racing my brother across a railroad bridge to get to the other side before the train came. Riding a dinky little rubber raft down a river into a reservoir with no lifeguard, not to mention lots of rocks and dangerous currents. Bringing home what I thought was a sweet little lost dog who turned out to have rabies or distemper or whatever it is that causes a dog to foam at the mouth and try to bite a person’s arm off.

I could go on, but the pertinent fact is that I survived all of it, which I probably shouldn’t say because it might be unlucky.

Maybe Mr. McCarthy and the Dalai Lama have a point after all.