Of all the luck...

            I’m not exactly sure what constitutes luck, but I feel I’ve had my share of it in my life. Some of it was good luck, and some of it was bad luck, and probably some of it wasn’t really luck at all, but instead just the result of some choices I have made along the way, both good and bad.

            I remember a time several years ago when I was helping my cousin put an engine back in his car. I use the term “helping” loosely, because I didn’t really know much about putting engines in cars, but I was there offering encouragement when it looked like things were going good, and pushing things that needed to be pushed, and pulling things that needed to be pulled, when they weren’t.

            The car was a big Oldsmobile of some kind, and the hood alone was bigger than a lot of the cars that are on the road today. The hinges for the hood were big pieces of angle iron fastened to big springs to help lift the hood when you wanted to look at the engine.  It was a lot easier to take the engine out and then put it back in if the hood was out of the way, so we had taken it loose from the hinges and put it over in the corner of the barn so it wouldn’t get stepped on.

            It was also a lot easier to get around the engine compartment if the hinges weren’t sticking up in the way, but they were welded to the firewall so you couldn’t really take them out very easily. You could get them out of the way a little bit if you were strong enough to push them down on the springs in the closed position, and once they reached the closed position, they would stay down on their own, until someone jarred them loose, at which time they would snap open with enough power and speed to lift the giant hood. They developed a lot more speed when the hood was over in the corner of the barn.

             As luck would have it, I wasn’t paying much attention to my proximity to the driver side hinge when it took a notion to snap to attention, and the end of the angle iron opened a jagged cut beside my right eye that required 13 stitches to close. Dr. Hollenberg, who sewed me up, and a lot of other people who didn’t, told me I was lucky, because if the hinge had been another inch to the left, I would have lost my eye. I figured if I had really been lucky, it would have been another inch to the right and thereby would have missed me altogether. Different perspectives on luck, I suppose.

            A businessman who I considered successful once told me that the harder he worked, the luckier he got. I thought he was confusing work and success with luck, but then again I thought maybe they were all inter-connected, so I never argued the point with him. I think most of us usually make our own luck and success, good and bad, and sometimes it just depends on how hard we are willing to work, and where we are standing at the time. And sometimes it just depends on whether or not we are paying attention.

Anyway, as we enter the new year, I hope we all have a chance to work for the success we want, and that we all have enough good luck to keep us encouraged, and just enough bad luck to keep us paying attention. Oh, and Happy New Year. And for what it’s worth, good luck.

Side of the times.....

I don’t suppose it’s any secret that things look differently depending upon how you look at them. I think they call that perspective. Several years ago, when I was attending Millville Grade School, our bus driver, Howard Tucker, gave each one of the students on his route a box of chocolate covered cherries when we headed home on the last day of school before our Christmas break. It was back in the day when a pound of candy weighed a pound, instead of eleven ounces.

             I was in the third grade at the time, and outside of the occasional candy bar from Kelly’s Ranch Market in Millville, or Saffer’s General Store in Mooreland, most of the candy I had consumed up until that time consisted of the Circus Peanuts that Mom got when the Jewel Tea man stopped by. And sometimes Dad would get a box of chocolate from a place called Lowery’s up in Muncie, but he always kept it hidden where us kids couldn’t find it, and rationed the pieces out like we were still caught up in the war effort.

             At any rate, a pound of chocolate covered cherries looked pretty good to a third grader, and I was fully aware that when I carried them in the house, Mom would insist that I share them with my six brothers and sisters, or Dad would confiscate them and then hand them out one at a time, just like he did with the expensive candy from Muncie, and no doubt sharing it with my siblings just as Mom suggested. I decided I had two miles to eat the contents of the box and stop that from happening.

            For as good as that box of chocolate covered cherries looked when I got on that bus, it was several years before I could stand to even look at one again. I have never thought they looked as good again as I thought they looked that fateful December afternoon.

            When I started driving, gasoline was about a quarter a gallon. The price increased slowly over the next fifteen years, until it finally reached the unimaginable plateau of a dollar a gallon. A lot of old time filling stations had to change out their pumps because the old ones weren’t capable of displaying a cost of more than ninety nine cents per gallon. And once the stations had the capability of three digit gas, all bets were off.

            Shortly after the turn of the century, gasoline reached 2 dollars a gallon, another unimaginable level. Drivers were concerned. People started carpooling. Businesses started adding fuel surcharges trying to offset the increased cost. And on and on.

            According to some reports, we are approaching two dollar a gallon gas again, and while most of us dreaded reaching that price ten years ago, we’re actually looking forward to it now.  Perspective again, I suppose. It all depends on which side you’re looking at it from.

             Aging is similar, I think. Sixty seemed pretty old when I was thirty. It doesn’t seem quite so old. Come to think of it, sixty-five doesn’t seem quite so old anymore, either. Or seventy.

             But however we feel about chocolate covered cherries, or the price of gas, or getting older, we’re right in the middle of the Christmas season now, and for some reason, people who celebrate Christmas seem to look forward to it no matter how many or how few Christmases they have had. A different perspective on things, I suppose.

            Merry Christmas.

My Main Squeeze....

         There are things I do willingly, things I do hesitantly, things I do begrudgingly, and things I won’t do at all. This morning I threw away a toothpaste tube.  I refuse to call it an empty toothpaste tube, because as we all know, a toothpaste tube is never really empty. You can always go back to the crimped end and knead and cajole enough from the tube to at least partially fill your toothbrush one more time. And after you’re sure you’ve gotten every last bit out of the tube, you can go back and do it again.

            That’s why I’m hesitant to throw the tube away. I know that someday I may find the tube I’m trying to use really is empty, and I will be haunted with the grim reality that the tube with one more brush full, or partial brush full in it, is now buried in a landfill somewhere north of Modoc. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it could.

            I operate a small construction company, and last week we started building a new home up the road. I’m normally hesitant to start a new project like that so late in the year, with Indiana winters being what they are, or what they can be, but times being what they are, it seemed like a prudent idea to use the good weather days, and even some not so good weather days, to get the home, and ourselves, enclosed for the bad weather days that are bound to get here.

             As much as I enjoy my work, I can’t deny the outdoors part of it is a little less enjoyable when the temperature gets below 30 and the wind gets above it. And while I might tend to step out of the door in the morning a little more hesitantly, I hope I never do it begrudgingly.

            Earlier this fall, there was a lot of news coverage about a young woman in Oregon who had been diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer, and decided to end her life through an assisted suicide before the cancer could end it for her. I certainly won’t deny that she had the right to make the decision she made. The right to control our own lives is one of the most basic rights we have. But I wouldn’t have made the same decision, even begrudgingly. Admittedly, I haven’t been diagnosed with a terminal illness, yet, but with or without an illness, I realize life itself is terminal.

            If our lives were divided into seasons, I’m probably in the late autumn or early winter stage, missing a lot of my hair, but happy to still have most of my teeth. I have a few aches and pains that come along with 62 years, and people who know have told me those aches and pains will become more numerous as more time passes. But I also have my parents, and my wife, and my children and grandchildren, and a whole bunch of family and friends that I look forward to seeing at least a few more times.

            So I’m going to get as much toothpaste as I can out of the tube, and then try for a little more. And I’m going to work every day that I can this month, so that I’ll have some place to work next month. And I’m going to do all I can to hang around as long as I can, because of all of those people I want to see again.

            And when a higher power decides it’s my time to go, I will, but not without trying to squeeze a little more out of things before I go.