lucky

I have written a lot,

I don’t get tired of it, it’s my thing, particularly in this form.  In past contexts, I had to deal with editors and deputy editors and the oftentimes stand off between them (and not get caught in the melee), subeditors (a good one can make you, a bad one .. !), the brief – and so on.  

So I was shocked when AJ said “It doesn’t matter if nobody reads it…”.  Oh yes it does.   That’s like saying it doesn’t matter how much I talk – oh yes it does.   However attenuated, this is one side of dialogue.  

40 plus years ago, a woman interviewing me remarked that I seemed to remember every kind or nice thing I had ever experienced.  Obviously the comment made an impression.  You risk sounding precious (ugh), self aggrandising (guilty – ego like a house) but I would rather that than endless child picking at bloody graze, recital of bad news, which must then be interpreted from this angle and that.  

We all know people with more money.  We all know people with worse luck.  Hitting the balance between knowing it could be better and knowing how much worse it could be is the beginning of the appreciation of chance. 

Being lucky.

Lucky doesn’t cost.  It comes.  Unless you are a complete mug, you note it – quietly as you paddle round frying onions and sipping the drink you now only have occasionally, openly to at least yourself in recognition about what could have gone wrong.

There is big lucky ie  the bomb hits, or the killers come.  But you’re not there.   Big lucky is when the chancy operation comes good.  Big lucky is when you miss the train that crashes.  And you come to see things as big lucky as in, if you hadn’t passed or failed or gone here or done that – this person, this opportunity, this life would not be as it is – you’d have missed a chance. 

You were just  – lucky.

And there is little lucky.   You choose the right gift for your notoriously difficult partner or her mother or his father.   The bank makes a mistake and it’s bit better than you thought.   You decide, Devil take the hindmost, that you will wear those old shoes (well brushed of course)

rather than the new ones to the party or the wedding or dinner with your daughter’s future in laws for the first time – and thank heaven, because you need all the help you can get, comfort being a good place to start. You need to be thinking about the matter in hand, not worrying that your feet hurt. Lucky.

I was asked by a therapist “Why did you go to America ?” (when I was 19 and stayed just under 2 years.)  I said “Running away, I expect.”  He said quietly “I think you were running to …”   And then explained – my role in the family, the difficulties, the distance and the freedom of it.   And it made sense.  Lucky.  And when I went back to the US in my first almost non secretarial role, I used all sorts of experiences I didn’t know I had absorbed and – if that wasn’t lucky enough – I used the second exposure where nobody who knew me could see me and any embarrassment was strictly my own, to better effect when I got my break in Britain.   And I gave up trying to be an actress  (I would surely have been an addict or a drunk) and fell into radio.  Where nobody cared what I looked like – only how I sounded.  Lucky.      

All this was described back to me as “a perfect life”.   No, I don’t do perfection.  I am very happy to leave that to the majesty of nature and the might of heaven. 

But lucky ?  Yes.  

Now, all of us who are older would tell you how lucky we were to go here, or meet that one, or work at so-and-so when it was new.   We can’t offer that world to anybody else, we haven’t got it.  This morning a noticeably unhysterical neighbour said in conversation “We are on the brink of World War III and nobody wants to talk about it.”  

Unless we’re lucky.