Good Luck
One of my favorite stories is about an antiques expert who, one day, while driving down a country road, stops at junky-looking store. Before going in, he notices, in the entrance-way, a cat drinking from a saucer. The cat doesn’t interest him – but what does is the saucer, which, he can tell immediately is of a very rare and valuable kind. This crafty man goes in and chats with the proprietor and offers him $10 for the cat. They are just about to conclude the transaction, when the customer says, “Oh, I’ll need something to feed it from – can you just throw in the saucer as part of the deal?” – which brings the reply, “Nothing doing! – that’s my lucky saucer! This is the third cat I’ve sold from it since we opened here.”
Of course, people have many different ideas about what brings them good luck. Sometimes it’s an object they carry, like the time-honored rabbit’s foot. Sometimes it’s a habit which has no other value – like the practice of touching every fencepost along a certain street. Children particularly make games about the marks they see on pavements. I suppose this hasn’t changed much since my own childhood, when the rule was: “Step on a crack – break your mother’s back.” To this was added, at some point in my informal education: “Step on a line – break your father’s spine.” That more or less took care of the parental vertebral column.
So much for bad luck – but there don’t seem to have been any pavement markings for good luck. This whole subject is, however, capable of being dismissed as “superstition” which means belief without reason. So, how do we draw a line between superstition and religion? I can only suggest that it’s all a matter of Culture. What is respectably religious in one culture may be condemned as ludicrously superstitious by another. In either case, what it comes down to is how you are taught while growing up. In our culture, the belief that 13 is an unlucky number is extremely widespread, so much so that some tall buildings have no thirteenth floor, and no rooms numbered thirteen.
My mother used to say “Well, I’m not superstitious – but I would never sleep thirteen in a bed.”
And I don’t know how those believers argue away the fact that the original United States were at first thirteen colonies, who are still represented by thirteen stripes on the American Flag.
But superstition enters into many people’s daily lives in connection with such matters as spilling salt, walking under ladders, and seeing black cats.
And of course there are also the supposed harbingers of good luck, such as a four-leaf clover.
I myself have experienced just two momentously happy occasions, which I can only attribute to good luck, since I did nothing to deserve them, or to bring them about. The first brought me the best job I ever had – teaching on a “Floating University,” with which I made two three-and-a-half month voyages around the world. This opportunity came more or less “out of the blue,” in a situation in which, because it was very late in the hiring season, most of the teaching positions for which I was qualified were no longer available.
The second piece of very good fortune occurred in 1967, about two years after that first one. I was no longer teaching on a ship, or anywhere else, but had gone into business in San Francisco, on a very small scale, selling postcards which bore my own epigrams. However, I had no funds to invest and had to pay a printing company every time I needed more cards. That company also made and sold printing machines, but at a much higher price than I could afford.
Here comes the good luck. For reasons of their own, that company was raffling off one of their machines. All the customer had to do was drop a folded slip of paper into an appropriate “fishbowl” to become a participant in this lottery. This I did, and forgot all about it until, weeks later, a message arrived congratulating me on being the winner.
I don’t know how many other slips of paper comprised the pool from which mine had been chosen, but this extraordinary piece of good luck enabled me to make a career out of publishing what eventually became 10,000 different cards.
Since then, I can only claim to have been lucky enough to survive into my nineties, with no very serious bad luck along the way.