Good Luck

On luck, life, immodesty, and trying

Good luck was something my grandfather used to say as a farewell at the end of a visit. He’d walk me to the door, put his hand on my shoulder, and tell me Good luck. The first time my wife heard him say it, she asked me if he knew something we didn’t. Probably, I said. His saying good luck at the door like that was, I think, an acknowledgment that in addition to all the other things one needed to navigate this world, one also needed luck.

At the skatepark a while back (I realized recently that many of my anecdotes begin with those words… anyway), I found myself being immodest. Immodesty is not my default. My default is so far in the opposite direction that it sometimes (often, always) bypasses self-effacing and goes directly into something resembling self-defeating. I mentioned to a friend at the skatepark that I was leaving on a research trip and he asked if I got another grant to help fund the trip. I said that yes, I had received a research grant. You get a lot of those, he said. Yeah, I said, I guess I’m just lucky.

My wife has heard me say this same thing many times—whenever I get a grant or get something published, I always say it’s because I’m lucky—and she has corrected me every time to say that these things happen because I work hard. And I do. I mean, relatively. I’m a writer: I work hard when I’m working, but I also sit around and look out the window a lot. So that morning at the skatepark, after I heard myself say I got that grant because I was lucky, I corrected myself and said: Actually, I got it because I work hard and I’m good at writing grant proposals. But then after hearing myself be immodest, I backtracked and said something self-deprecating. Pretty classic on my part; being in my head is like being on a roller-coaster. Once I heard myself heading down that path of self-deprecation, I stopped talking, shrugged, and changed the subject. Actually, I skated away to go try some trick I probably didn’t land. (See! I’m doing it again.)

Back when I was recovering from having had a stroke, I was unable to do much of anything at all, and so I spent an inordinate amount of time skateboarding or walking around in nature. And a lot of that time I spent in nature was spent looking at turtles. Slow and steady made a certain kind of sense to me in my illness and recovery. While out walking one day, I came across a big old snapping turtle that was trapped behind a fence at the water purification plant. Its shell was more than 30 cms in diameter and it probably weighed around 7 or 8 kgs, so climbing over the fence to rescue it was out of the question. As I thought about what to do, the turtle paced in its turtle way, back and forth along the edge of the fence. It was egg-laying season. My guess was that it dug a hole under the fence to go lay some eggs and then couldn’t find its way back to that hole once it was done. I tried coaxing it toward the gate where there was enough room for it to crawl under, but snapping turtles are not easily coaxed.

I rang the buzzer at the side door of the water purification plant and waited. A man wearing a hardhat and a reflective vest came out of a door on the other side of the gate. I pointed at the turtle and explained the situation. Instead of picking up the turtle and moving it himself, he opted instead to hand me his security pass through the chain-link fence so that I could open the gate from my side and go get the turtle myself. She was not happy to be rescued. She was big and smelly, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, snappy. I picked her up—carefully—and carried her outside of the yard while the man in the hardhat kept his distance. (He started closing the gate before the turtle and I were all the way out of the yard.) I walked the turtle to the lake and placed her down gently in some grass. As soon as I did so, she turned on me—surprisingly quickly for a turtle—and snapped her powerful jaws. I jumped back, and had a few words with her. You’re lucky I came by when I did, I said. My hands smelled like turtle for the rest of the day.

I got lucky is something I found myself telling people after I had my stroke (whenever that was—months ago? years?). I didn’t lose my ability to walk or speak; I didn’t have to relearn how to read or write. It did take a year for my brain and vision to return to some kind of normal, and I couldn’t do much during that time—besides looking at turtles, but I eventually got better, and that’s lucky, right?

I’ve been trying to write this third essay in a trilogy of short essays I started after having that stroke. The first two came easily. (One was published in Geist Magazine last year and the other one will be coming out soon.) But this third one has been a work-in-progress for a long time now. I’ve taken pages and pages of notes. I’ve written nearly half a dozen first paragraphs, and many, many middle paragraphs—fourteen pages worth. But I have yet to write—and I think this is the problem—the last paragraph. Sometimes the last paragraph or sentence is the first thing I write. And then I try to find my way there. Part puzzle, part maze. But in this instance, I can’t write the final paragraph because—maybe—there is no final paragraph. When I began writing the essay, I thought once it was done, I’d be finished with thinking about what had happened to me. Or maybe it’s that I thought I understood it enough to write about it and move on. But that’s clearly not the case.

I started writing the third essay because I felt like I had a few more things to say about what happened. I also felt like I wasn’t being completely honest with how I felt about it in the other two essays. In those other two pieces, there was a deliberate effort on my part to present as cool, calm, and collected; as level, even, peaceful, wise! Wiser than I was—am. But it was a front. I was a mess on the inside. My thoughts were like that turtle stuck behind the fence: scrabbling, digging, pacing back and forth with no clear way forward—and maybe even a little snappy. I wanted to project a positive outlook—because I was trying to project upon myself a positive outlook: sort of a dress-for-the-job-you-want situation. But on the inside, I was a mess.

Am I still a mess? Yes and no. Something happened. In trying to present that calm front, I became that calm front. I became that which I sought to be by pretending to be that which I sought to be. Part of me hates how positive I’ve become. It’s embarrassing. But I do feel lucky, lucky to be alive. A friend told me recently that she wants to live to be 300 years old. That’s how much she loves being alive. I don’t know how I feel about 300, but I’m here for that energy: very positive, very fun, not embarrassing. 10 out 10. 

During one of my last visits with my grandfather, he gave me a hug and told me he felt lucky that he’d lived a good, long life. He knew then that he was dying. We all knew. He was 91 years old. As I was walking down the driveway after saying goodbye at the door, my grandfather called out: Good luck! When I said it back to him, he waved it away and said: I don’t need it anymore.