"LUCK", by Stephanie

I don't believe in Luck. Good luck, bad luck: I've found myself falling into both categories without perceiving it as "luck" per se. The events that encourage, bombard, whisper, promise, deny, appear in dreams, are all part of the larger wholesomeness of life itself. That we have given these forces the name 'luck' is curious and most probably something that our ancestors referred to as a need to explain what could not be easily understood. There is still the same need to identify and define, unexplainable mysteries remain and shall always exist in everyday life.

Good and Bad happen all the time, every day, in all settings. Is this due to luck? Is it due to nature and our small standing in the universe? Is it just random junk that rains down? What to we do with it? ... turn it into an opportunity, or recoil from it damningly? It all depends on our outlook, background, previous encounter(s), whereby we mold it into what it becomes, if we can. Sometimes it feels as though we are getting some kind of divine assistance or help from an unknown source. And we give thanks, gratitude and feel "lucky." Sometimes it feels as though we are marked and something or someone is simply out to get us, and we ask "why?" I like that we're here for such a short time really, and whatever comes is relative to what happens to the next person. Our grumblings about being unlucky may be something deeply wished for by another. Our good fortunes may be small change to another type of person elsewhere.

Luck is a kind of reference made up in our mind that shoots us through all kinds of opportunity or obstacle. We may "feel" lucky or unlucky, which is a fleeting period of time. The next moment will bring us a new and oddly different series of thoughts. It's a remarkable facet of living that so much is set before us and that we have to sort it out in our own particular way! Seneca wrote that “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” So it comes from US. It's a recipe. Go out and make your own luck! In this, I do believe.

"Recipes for Four-Leaf Clovers", by James

When I made my plans to venture out of Copenhagen to take in the Danish countryside, I thought that I would spend my time exploring forests or riding horses. But as luck would have it I had caught a bit of a cold before leaving the city, and so my energy was low and I didn't want to do anything except sit and relax in the sunshine. The little cottage had a small, untidy garden. There were more weeds growing within it than planned plants, but in the Scandinavian springtime no living thing is ugly, and I was content to sit and drink in the sun alongside this emerging patch of life.

I wasn't looking for luck. That’s strange for me, really; usually I remember to keep my eyes open for some trifle, some silly small excuse to feel lucky. But at this moment I was enraptured by the feeling of the sun and breeze upon my bare arms, the sound of the birds in the nearby forest, the faint smell of roses in my one unclogged nostril. It was only a coincidence that my eyes fell to rest on a place that had something special to show me. Could it really be …? I bent close to investigate. Yes! Yes it is! It was a clover with four leaves.

I had never seen one before. Really I had always thought they were something made up, a piece of mythology, or perhaps an excuse for lovers to lie down side-by-side in a field. But here I held one in my fingers. I sat for a moment and stared at it in wonder. Three of the leaves were strong and broad; they held the classical heart-shape that one associates with clover leaves. The fourth was smaller, asymmetrical, slightly withered, as if it had hesitated before finally deciding to grow. But there were four leaves, unmistakably, and I felt like the crowned Queen of Luck.

I got up from my garden seat and took my treasure inside to the kitchen. There I heated some water and stirred in my charm along with a bit of honey and ginger, hoping this infusion would ease my cold. Then I went back into the garden sunshine to drink my tea.

I thought a bit about good luck charms and how they might work. I've found face-up pennies before, but I don’t remember any bringing me extraordinary luck. Face-up pennies are perhaps the most common of good-luck tokens, though, so maybe they don´t have such great power. I've seen plenty of horseshoes but I've never found one, and it is the finding of it that makes it lucky, I've been told. But a four-leaf clover … that must be something exceedingly rare. I wondered briefly if I had squandered my chance to win the lottery.

Maybe there are some rules for how a four-leaf clover should be handled in order to harvest as much luck from it as possible. Maybe eating the clover is less effective than, say, tucking it into one’s hat band or pressing it between the pages of one’s diary. But I've never read any instructions for a situation like this. I figured I was still carrying the clover with me, albeit inside of me, so I hitched a ride into town and went to a convenience store where lottery tickets were sold. I bought a scratcher and scratched it. And I won. As simple as that. I won twenty krone, which is about five bucks. I thought of buying another ticket so I could win some more, but I've heard that when one has luck one should not push it, so I just walked back toward the cottage, whistling to myself.

Along the way home I was thinking about what it means to be lucky. I knew that my winning lottery ticket was nothing momentous, and that someone might say that winning such a small amount was not luck, yet it still felt special to have experienced this and the four-leaf clover discovery alongside each other. I knew also that someone might say my win had nothing to do with the clover. But it seemed to me that the clover did make me lucky - by reminding me to be lucky. I wouldn't have tried the lottery without it. I wouldn't have found the lucky clover in the first place if I hadn't had a cold, and my countryside activities hadn't been derailed, so the cold was lucky too. But I began to wonder: was I lucky because I found the four-leaf clover, or did I find the four-leaf clover because I was already lucky? I thought that maybe being lucky and finding a symbol of luck caused each other at the same time, chicken-and-egg style.

I figured that if that were true then I’d be all the more likely to find another token of luck if I looked for one at that moment. So when I returned to the cottage I went back to the garden spot where I was sitting earlier. My eyes easily returned to the patch of grass where I found my four-leaf clover. It took only a moment of scanning the ground to find another one. Soon after that I found another one, and then another. It wasn't long before I had a tiny bouquet of clovers with four leaves pinched between my fingers.

My reaction to this bounty of four-leaf clovers was mixed. At first I was confused and I doubted that my eyes were telling the truth. Could all of them really have four leaves? I counted again, looking at each one carefully. Yes, there was no mistake. Then it occurred to me that they could have been planted there purposely, or that maybe some weird chemical had been dumped out in this spot, causing the things that grew here to mutate. I looked at the small plants in my hand and wondered if there was anything special about them at all.

A moment later I was back to smiling. Of course finding these little plants was something special! It was a beautiful and unexpected discovery; it colored my day and made me feel extraordinary; it gave me something curious to tell a story about and equally it gave me something wonderful to keep a secret; it carried with it an element of mystery; it was something I had wanted to experience since I was a little girl. For these reason I was lucky – there can be no question.

I’m lucky very often. By that I mean that very often I have moments of awareness of the abundance of beauty and kindness and health and security and enormous potential present throughout my life. Of course I also experience moments when I am more aware of ugliness, hatred, disease, fear, and limitation. But I choose to focus on what brings me up rather than what brings me down, and that makes me feel good. My word for that good feeling is lucky.

A glance at the clock pulled me back to reality. I had to get my things together and return to Copenhagen. I had an invitation for a dinner party that evening. I was assigned to bring a green salad and I still had to buy the ingredients and put it together. Buying fresh veggies in the early spring in a Nordic country is a bit of a splurge - just a head of lettuce costs over five dollars.

I didn't know what to do with the four leaf clovers in my hand. Before they even had a chance to wilt I had changed my ideas about what constitutes luck. They were no longer magical, although they remained something significant. I couldn't just throw them away, and yet I couldn't justify treating them as something exalted.

In the end I threw the four-leaf clovers into the salad. I figured it was a cheap way to beef it up a bit. Plus there was a cold going around; I figured everyone could use the extra luck.

"Nice to Meet You", by Emily Nudge

I was born in 1971. I am 37 years old. I have met a lot of people in my life. I have been to many places and have interacted with many different types of people, both young and old. I am blessed with having been influenced by many and have had the honor of influencing many on my own.

Sometimes I will see someone who recognizes me. They will say, "Hello Emily!" I will look at them with a blank stare and wonder how they know me. I will have no recollection of when we might have interacted long enough for them to remember my name; let alone remember my name in connection with who I am physically. I will say "hello" back to them and try to not have a conversation with them for fear of showing that I have no idea who they are.

However if I know that our paths will cross numerous times after this first encounter I'll fess up right away that I do not remember them or how we meet. The person will inform me and I'll have to trust them that they know what they are talking about. Most of the time I'll do some research and figure out that what they say is indeed true. I'll ask around or look in a photo album from that time period and sure enough there they are.

I wish this phenomenon wasn't the case – I wish I remembered more people who have walked the same path as me. I know that if I saw someone who worked with me in 1989 at Camp Hoover I'd have a hard time remembering his or her name. I know that if I crossed paths with someone from college I'd not know who they were at all. I know this.

I also know that there are many people I remember and when we see each other I try to make eye contact with me and I can see in their eyes that they know who I am but refuse to acknowledge me. They look away and the line of the mouth changes as if they are holding back what they might want to say. They quickly get busy with what they are doing so they don't have to look back. I try to keep looking at them so that if there is a chance they want to change their minds that I am there to receive them but this never happens. I know that sometimes the past is best left in the past.

I firmly believe that humans cross paths for a purpose. Our journey as a human on this planet does things for each other. My interactions with one person might cross someone else's path when I'm not even physically there. I know that we smile and cry and kiss and hug and stumble with each other or against each other and that all this makes an impact on our lives.

"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.”