poplar road

With all the people one knows in life all going about their business day in and day out – even without the six degrees of separation – it shouldn't be surprising that at certain times it will seem like good luck falls on everyone simultaneously. For example, in the past six month period, 5 healthy babies have been born to our friends and family, two friends extricated themselves from poisonous relationships and started their lives over at new jobs, Richard and I both made breakthroughs in getting help for our health, and although two people experienced serious heart attacks, both are recovering. One could see some serendipity in those good things all happening so close together. (Or maybe there was a long power outage in the Lower Mainland a year or so ago?) Anyway. Those are happy things which have much more to do with hard work by good people than with serendipity except in their timing. But when you turn that on its head and look at bad things happening to good people, you have to wonder if the universe is ticked for some reason, or is there a rogue dragon with less childish charm and more unassuaged rage galloping around burning holes in the normal weave of people's lives?

Take Tuesday, for instance. Allyson was having what she considered a good day, despite the fact that her workplace is a construction zone and she's trying to churn out Napoleons (Allyson, what is a Napoleon?) while tradesmen use air tools all around her. Unfortunately, a tradesman lost his grip on a large sheet of plywood just as she was loading her Napoleons into a display case nearby. Wham, right on her bent neck.

Aside from a nasty lump and a headache she'll be all right. Just bad luck. Could have been worse. He could have dropped his air nailer on her head instead of the plywood, or something. As a writer, always aware of cause and effect, and conspiring to worsen the conditions we put our characters in, I could trace backward from that situation and claim the cause was the business owner's choice to run his shop in the midst of such chaotic renovations, or trace a slightly different series of events in which Allyson might have ended up in hospital. But, since Allyson merely took the afternoon off, it will be shrugged off as an isolated incident for which the contractor is suitably apologetic.

What gets me thinking, however, is the fact that about the same time that Allyson's boss was applying ice to her neck, I was getting out of my three quarter tonne pickup (a.k.a. the tank) to examine the damage my rear passenger side fender and mudflap had just done – with an alarming sound like a bicycle being crushed – to the nose of a small black Cavalier driven by a 20-year-old boy. Whether it was all my doing as I moved over to the right turn lane, or the boy had picked up enough speed behind me approaching the light that as he tried to pass me to enter the right turning lane he couldn't avoid wedging his car into my wheel well, I'll probably never know. Given that he'd just had another accident a couple of weeks ago, I doubt he'll be entirely honest in his claim report. I had to be: with the canopy on my truck, I have a blind spot the size of a cow, and this guy's car was no taller than my fenders. He was three car lengths behind me, and then he was a black blot on my side mirror as I put the truck in park. I apologized profusely – he did not, now that I think of it – and the bill will probably be in the mail to me in a couple of months. The second bill, since back in February on another visit to Vancouver I put a crack in a parked car's bumper while navigating the wilds of Granville Island in a torrential downpour, trying to deliver my five-year-old niece to dance class. Sigh. As with the last time, there was hardly any damage to my truck, just a bend in the metal flange coming out from the wheel well where it scraped the paint off the car (mostly as I was moving the truck forward after the accident, rather than during it). Paint was the only casualty, no injuries – there wasn't even a bang, just the scraping noise. Again, could have been worse. I could have been travelling at road speed rather than slowed to a crawl for the light, in which case my tank would have crushed his car like a little black ant and him with it. So causally it was my fault, but the universe was still smiling on me because I thankfully did no worse than scrape some paint?

I guess what I'm mulling over is, does "serendipity" have an opposite? Do we have a word for people to whom bad luck gravitates as if they have a talent for it? Or days on which the bad luck concentrates in ripples? I wonder if I asked around, whether anything unexpected and "bad" (whether an injury as in Allyson's case, or merely an unfortunate expense as in mine) happened to the rest of our circle of friends around lunch hour this Tuesday? Or is it me, and the accidents are just part of this slump I'm in, where being unemployed could be said to be the root cause of the accident, since I wouldn't have been in Vancouver either time if I was busy at home with work? Then again, the worst luck Richard and I have had was just under a year ago when we headed south to California on that very expensive road trip from hell, so perhaps I should be blaming our truck! (I love my truck. Sat in a Smart Car at the auto show last Friday and felt like I was trapped in a Campbell's soup can with windows.) I guess, to go back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, we rely on chance to be unexpected, unpredictable. When Guildenstern flips a coin, over and over, and the litany "heads… heads… heads…" has gone on so long that even preoccupied Rosencrantz takes notice, we're not amazed, we're disturbed. We can take the bad luck because we know there's an equal chance of good luck; even if we believe fate is the result of choice, we must believe our luck can simply change, for the better. And we console ourselves that it could always be worse. My stance is to work hard at getting the choices right, but to ask the universe for a little help, like with my job hunt. And to you I say, wish me luck.