It’s been an eventful three months for my family. Highlights include one or more of us surviving a six-story plunge, a motorcycle accident, an emergency abdomen operation, and an errant pickup truck imbedded in a bedroom wall.
We racked up a cumulative four weeks of the twelve in three separate hospitals. After hospital stays during July, August, and September, I established a new family goal to stay out of hospitals for the entire, very long month of October. Well, we’re halfway there, despite the best efforts last week of the errant pickup truck driver from a local lawn care service, who planted the front bumper of his truck inside my bedroom. Thank goodness he forgot to light his Molotov cocktail on wheels.
The pickup truck got attention. Well, the news reports gave it attention. Three of the local stations’ three helicopters were in the air over our home that afternoon. “It’s a slow news day” the fire department Lieutenant told me. “You got all three choppers in the air!”
“Dad,” one of my sons told me, “I saw your suspenders. You look good.” Even my auto mechanic told me, “saw you on the news last week.”
Now when friends and colleagues see me coming, that is if they don’t walk out of their way to avoid me, they shake their heads and mutter something to the effect of “man, what a bunch of bad luck!” Or, “heard you did a little remodeling.”
Thing is, I don’t think I have bad luck, although I have often reflected upon that old blues lyric, If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. I reflect on the lyric, but I prefer to see the good luck in all the recent misadventures. Despite all the calamities, tragedies really, which occurred, every member of my family is alive and well. That’s not just luck; it’s miraculous. And miraculous again. And miraculous again. And miraculous yet again.
One doesn’t normally survive hurtling to Earth from six stories up. One doesn’t normally survive laying down a motorcycle at neighborhood speeds. One doesn’t normally find a surgeon in his office at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon for an emergency consult. And certainly not one who gets you admitted into the hospital within hours and performs surgery the following morning. Finally, neither does one normally walk away from a hurtling Molotov cocktail that crashes into a home.
Yes, I guess I’d like to spend some of my good luck on a winning lottery ticket, and I can certainly do with less excitement, but hey, I’m satisfied the miracles keep rolling in.
Here are a couple of reports regarding the pickup truck hitting the house:
Avocado Love 