The Luck of the Draw
And Nothing Else Matters
Sometimes I feel like the ant who is just ambling along one lazy, warm summer afternoon, maybe on his way back home after a hard day’s work at carrying sticks, when suddenly, splat, he is squished by a jogger. Yes, with ants and people, the twists and turns of life have little to do with planning and everything to do with good or bad fortune than with anything else although some people are ;luckier or less lucky than others.
Take the children who one minute are kicking around a worn and torn soccer ball in the dusty, crater marked street in Afghanistan on a Sunday afternoon when suddenly, boom, they are all gone, vanished without a trace, vaporized by a missile fired by an American drone that wasn’t as precise as its advertisers claimed. Or you go to ShopRite to pick up some whole wheat bread and a package of bologna and white, American cheese and you return home feeling lousy and next thing, even though you got two vaccinations and a booster, you’re in the intensive care unit, your life hanging in the balance, as you are kept alive by a mechanical respirator after your lungs have been ravaged by COVID-19 that you likely caught from that guy with a long beard who sneezed on you, wasn’t wearing a mask and who was probably not vaccinated like so many others who feel that their personal rights are imperiled if they succumb to the warnings about masks.
Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I feel like that guy staring down the barrel of Dirty Harry’s .357 magnum and I’m wondering if, in fact, if I feel lucky that day and Harry answers back, no. Or maybe I’m George Bailey and I’ve jumped into the river because my life isn’t worth living and I find out that my so-called guardian angel, Clarence, is unavailable to save me because he is busy saving some other poor soul. And just my luck, I did shoot my eye out with my new Daisy BB rifle.
But it could turn out the other way and all the crystal balls, fortune tellers, ouija boards and other predictors can’t change or predict the future. Maybe the ant hears the foot descending and manages to safely scramble down the nearby ant hill, where he can see his wife and children and live to collect sticks on another day. And maybe the Americans who fire the drone missile get it right and there is no collateral damage and it does take out the intended victim, a man wanted for routinely and brutally leading the killings of hundreds of people. And those kids with the tattered soccer ball continue with their game, untouched. And maybe it turns out that I have the flu and I don’t have to be hospitalized and I recover to become well enough to write a best selling novel about the pandemic.
Maybe Dirty Harry pulls the trigger and he is out of bullets and maybe I’ve decided that just because I may be going to jail for embezzlement is no reason to end it all and never see my Zuzu again. And I point that new, shiny Daisy rifle and pull the trigger and it misses me and the BB falls silently and impotently to the ground and my mother will never tell me “I told you so.”
But in my heart I know that I am lucky, luckier than the man whose fate is to be permanently bent over and cannot utter a single word and is locked in his world because he had fetal alcohol syndrome and he was one of three siblings born out of wedlock and they don’t know who the father is and nobody visits the man who is permanently bent over and is confined to a home for people with disabilities. I could be that man were it not for a fortunate twist of fate that I was not born of an alcoholic mother.
I’m luckier than the young woman whose mother has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and hasn’t seen or spoken with her daughter for years. Who knows why some people cannot survive and must be protected, never to feel the freedom that others feel naturally and who survive and thrive because of nothing but dumb luck.
Or I am a pretty woman who is desperate for a soul mate but I am so troubled that I tried to take my life by jumping out of a second floor window, only to break both legs and suffer a fractured jaw. Nobody really knows why some people live darkened lives, seemingly with no hope and no way out and who find suicide the only solution to their suffering. While others just seem to have the right DNA and the right amount of good fortune to meet up with another and find love and compassion in their lives.
And I defy you to give me a good reason why at least 70 people died in tornadoes in Kentucky, including many who reported to work in a candle factory that was destroyed by the twister and why six people were in the wrong place when the roof collapsed while they were working at an Amazon warehouse. There is no answer other than it was meant to be, that the plan was for those people to die.
And then there are those who seems to have been cruelly singled out for tragedy but yet, like Lou Gehrig, they still feel like the luckiest people on the earth. Or at least that’s what the great Yankee said but I am sure that he would have been happier to announce that he was misdiagnosed and was able to play another season. Nobody likes bad luck even though you have to try and make the best of it.
John Lennon sang, “Life happens when you’re busy making other plans.” So I plan and I try to make things turn out right and I live my life honestly and on the square until the road changes overnight and I have to rearrange my plans, even though I thought I had it all worked out. But still I plan and hope and that is about the best anyone can do.