"Luck is in the Eye of the Beholder", by Carol Weintraub

I believe that any time I speak with someone, no matter how small the interaction, I come away a changed person. Everyone I encounter has an effect on me, from my next door neighbor to a clerk in a grocery store, or a lifelong friend. So when I sat down in the emergency waiting room, I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me.

This annoyed my daughter to no end. She didn’t say a word, but she flipped through the pages of her magazine faster than she could read them, and tapped her foot impatiently. I ignored her

The woman next to me was tiny and frail, with thinning grey hair in tight curls cut close to her head, and deep creases around her eyes, nose, and mouth. She was rubbing her right arm. Despite my own thinning grey hair and prominent liver spots on my hands, I still feel forty inside. Maybe fifty, on a tiring day. I had to remind myself that this wrinkled, feeble old woman was about my age.

“Did you hurt your arm?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she responded. She smiled at me. “Just cold.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Everyone keeps their place like a freezer in the summer. It’s lucky we don’t all get pneumonia."

“Why are you here today?” the woman asked.

I sighed. “Bad luck. I’m visiting my wonderful daughter,” I gestured towards Deanna, “Having such a lovely time, and then my blood pressure has to start acting funny.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “High?”

“No. Low. I fainted a few times. I tried to tell Deanna not to worry, but she insisted that I come here.”

Deanna closed her magazine and took a deep breath. “Mother, we talked about this. You could fall and hurt yourself badly. Plus, it’s not good to leave such low blood pressure unchecked.”

“Such a lovely visit we were having,” I repeated. “Let me show you pictures of my grandchildren.”

The woman looked at the pictures while I told her about each grandchild. “This is Sandy in the yellow dress. She’s thirteen, and her brother Brad is fifteen. He’s the one playing football. We went to one of his games yesterday, and he scored two- what are they called… goals, touchgoals, something like that… he’s very good. This is Jonathan, my first grandchild. I haven’t been able to see him this visit since he’s in his first year at Yale, but he’s such a good boy. He sends me postcards from school. It's Ivy League, you know. My daughter did such a good job raising her children, didn't you dear?"

Deanna smiled briefly but returned to her magazine, declining to get involved in the conversation

“My grandchildren are all grown up now,” said the woman. “In fact, I’m a great-grandmother three times over.”

“Mazel Tov!” I cried. “What a blessing! I should be so lucky to have great-grandchildren before I’m gone. I had my daughter when I was almost 35 years old, and she didn’t have children until she was nearly the same age, so I’m an old lady with young grandchildren.”

The woman chuckled, but Deanna stiffened with embarrassment. She put her finger to her lips, and motioned for me to lower my voice.

When she had been a teenager, and gone through that awful stage where everything I said or did embarrassed her, I had been very patient. I had read that new Dr. Spock book. Dr. Spock said that teenagers were searching for their identities, and pushing away from their parents in favor of their peers was an important part of finding themselves. So I didn’t get upset that Deanna was embarrassed by my very presence in public. I was calm, I waited it out, and just like Dr. Spock said, that phase that quickly passed.

Recently, though, it seemed like it was starting all over again. I had noticed that during our last few visits, Deanna was beginning to grow impatient with me about everything. She seemed embarrassed all over again about what I wore, what I said, and what I did. This time, I didn’t have the patience myself to wait it out. I don’t think that Deanna was doing it to find her own identity at 50 years old. I think it was about ME. And I was getting irritated.

“Do you have any pictures of your great-grandchildren?” I asked, turning away from Deanna.

“No,” said the woman, quietly. “Some old ones at home, but nothing up-to-date.”

I figured I should change the subject. “So, why are you in the emergency room today?” I asked.

She slowly lifted her foot from her shoe. She had no sock, and I could see an infection on her big toe, right near the nail. “I need to take another round of antibiotics,” she said.

“Couldn’t you get an appointment with your regular doctor for that?” I asked. “Why come to the emergency room where you’ll have to wait for hours?"

Just as she started to answer me, the triage nurse called her up to the registration desk. She took her walker and began to trudge up to the desk. Thank goodness I didn’t need one of those, I thought, crossing my fingers in unconscious superstition.

“Mother.” Deanna whispered sharply, her words like a cat’s hiss. “You can’t keep having these conversations with strangers.”

I tilted my head. “What’s so bad about conversations?”

“You don’t need to tell everyone you meet all the details of your life!” Deanna exploded. “This woman isn’t interested in hearing all about you.”

I was out of patience. I hadn’t told Deanna, but my neck was bothering me from my fainting spell last night, and I hadn’t kept much food down with the low blood pressure. I was hungry, in pain, and tired of having Deanna judge everything I did.

“That shows what you know,” I snapped at her. “I saw that woman when we came in. She was lonely and she was waiting for someone to talk to, so I sat down next to her on purpose. Stop treating me like a wayward child. I’m old, not stupid.”

Deanna’s mouth opened in surprise, and her eyes widened. I rubbed my forehead. We usually got along so well. I couldn’t remember the last time that I had raised my voice to her.

“I’m sorry, Ma,” said Deanna. She started to say more, but the woman came back from the registration desk, pushing her walker and readjusting herself back into the chair.

“Seems like I’ll be here for sometime today,” said the woman. “Cases like yours need to be seen before they’ll look at me.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked, pointing at her foot.

“Not really,” she said. “I would go to a regular doctor, since I only need the antibiotics, but I didn’t have a ride. The bus will take me right here, no transfers.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Do your children live far away?” I asked.

The woman bowed her head down and closed her eyes. “No.”

Deanna and I exchanged glances. I wasn’t sure what to say.

The woman licked her lips and hesitated. “I don’t want to burden you with my story...”

“It’s not a burden,” I insisted. “I should go maybe go out bowling instead of listening to you?"

The woman straightened up and leaned towards me, peering right into my eyes. “About five years ago, my husband died.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Well, he was very ill. He had a pension, and we had been putting a bunch of money into a good life insurance policy, so I had a little nest egg. My sons urged me to sell the house, and buy one of those assisted living condos nearby. I wasn’t so crazy about leaving the house, but,” she gestured to the walker, “it was getting harder to get up the stairs. So I moved into the condo. It wasn’t so bad.”

I held my tongue. I had told Deanna a million times that she should shoot me rather than leave me to die in one of those assisted living places. She would always laugh and tell me I would move in with her when the time came.

“The social workers organized a lot of group things. Lectures, social events, you know how those places are. They even got together a collection for the state lottery. I had never played the lottery before, but I did it to be sociable, you know. After a few weeks, we won a large amount of money.”

I whistled a long, low breath. “Really! How much did you win?”

“When we split up the money after taxes, each of us got over 100,000 dollars. I felt like my ship had come in, so they say. I decided to go to Poland, where my parents were born, for a trip to see the family still there.”

“How exciting!” I said.

“My eldest son, though, told me I should wait. He was doing all my financial paperwork at the time, and he wanted me to invest the money in the stock market. He said that I would get enough dividends after a while that I could take the trip and not have to touch the principal.”

“I see,” I murmured

“I didn’t feel so comfortable doing that; I remember all too well 1929 and how everyone in the stock market lost their shirts. Plus, how much time should a woman of my age wait to take a trip?”

I laughed, but she looked glum. On the other side of me, Deanna was now listening attentively to the story.

“We started to argue about the money. Finally, I put my foot down. It was my money, and I could make my own decisions. But my youngest son is a lawyer, and he told me that they could have a judge make me give them the money if he thought I wasn’t doing the right thing with it…”

There were tears in her eyes as she trailed off. There were tears in my eyes too. The woman blew her nose and slumped down in her seat. “I didn’t want to have to go to court, so I let my sons have control of the money. They send me the dividends from the stock market by check every month, but we don’t talk much otherwise.”

Before I could say anything to comfort her, the admitting nurse called my name. I pulled myself out of my chair, and Deanna took my arm to steady me.

“I’m so sorry for your troubles,” I told the old woman. “I hope your foot heals quickly.”

She nodded and smiled weakly. I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. There was nothing else I could do but go where the nurse was beckoning.

As we walked to the examining room, Deanna kept a steady arm linked around mine. “Ma,” she said softly, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings before. I don’t think you’re stupid.”

After a brief silence, I spoke. “Your father, God rest his soul, and I, we used to talk about what we would do if we won the lottery. Before you were born, we would buy a ticket every once in a while, whenever we had an extra quarter. We thought that it would be the luckiest thing that could ever happen to us." Deanna helped me onto the hospital bed. "This woman made me remember that having a caring, loving daughter like you was the luckiest thing that could ever happen to us.”

“Oh, Mama,” said Deanna, wiping away a tear with her hand.

A nurse entered the exam room, and pulled the curtains closed around my bed. It didn't do much to shut out the noise of the rushing doctors and moaning patients in nearby beds. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth, and wrapped a cuff around my upper arm.

"It's so tight," I told the nurse, referring to the cuff.

"Mouth closed please," was her only reply. Deanna stroked my arm above the cuff.

“55 over 75,” the nurse said disapprovingly, as she noted my blood pressure in a chart. The thermometer beeped, and I took it out of my mouth. The nurse glanced at it. "Temperature 95 degrees. You’re lucky that you didn’t do more than just faint before you came to the emergency room!” Deanna clutched my hand.

“All the luck I need is right here,” I said to the nurse, gesturing at Deanna. “It’s all right here.”