Most days I get caught up in the hope that I will run into as little calamity as possible, looking to eek out another busy day. Our schedules (though admittedly my wife creates a busier day for herself than I do), mostly out of guilt and poor planning gets packed to the gills. We sometimes get to a warm, cozy spot where all is in balance...
And then your doorbell rings. It is destiny calling. And destiny, it seems, is a really flustered carpenter.
At about noon on a regular old Thursday afternoon, the folks doing renovation upstairs from us hit a water pipe. Now, I don't mean they "hit" a "water pipe" in the way Cheech and Choong would, though it may have been the case.
I mean hit the way Captain Smith would in regards to an iceberg.
The super and the owner of the construction company flew into our apartment at a pace that said: Trouble. Or, a very silly grown up game of hide and seek. Oddly I hoped for the later.
At this point there were no visible signs of apocalypse. So a part of me was kind of like, “Hey. Dude. You mind not knocking my stuff all around. I sort of like some of it”.
His urgency would soon be clear when a single bead of water hit my shoulder.
This lonely bead of water reminds me of the time I was playing the greatest game of racquetball of my life. It was against my much smaller, more nimble Japanese roommate. He was awesome (and may in fact still be awesome). I always played him tough, but failed to come up a winner in any of our matches. This particular day I was playing him hard. I mean real hard. I was ahead late in the game. Something like 19 – 16. I saw victory. I went for the kill. I hit one of those tough slam-the-ball-hard-into-the-back-wall shots. I gave it my all. In giving it my all I somehow I managed to catch my face. In the moment I don’t remember much of the pain. But I remember this: I dropped for me knees and for one second (a second that, like all moments such as these, felt much longer) I watched one deep, dark drop of blood hit the floor. As I looked at that one drop I thought two things:
Oh.
And
Shit.
Just like my face during the racquetball “event” as it would come to be known, our ceiling, on that quite Thursday afternoon, opened up like a really good bible story.
The calamity was complete and total. Our personal items were salvaged. The walls and ceilings of over 75% of the apartment were not.
We had just begun to get settled in this new place. It was almost feeling like “home”. The place now looks like, well, if I came home and say a homeless man crapping in the corner, I would not be all that surprised. Let’s be clear. This was someone else’s fault entirely. We were sitting at home enjoying breakfast one morning and by the same night not able to eat a meal for the stench and dust that covered everything. It really would not be all that different if you were eating a really yummy cupcake and some dude punched you in the face. But then was like, “Oh. I’m sorry that’s not what I meant at all. My mistake.”
But since that day I have been feeling overly positive. The Red Sox and Patriots both blew late leads to lose over the weekend. I got a fever. I missed a long run. A bike ride with the wife was interrupted over a stupid argument.
All of these are annoyances, sure. But they are just that; annoyances, nothing more.
At this stage in the game I have realized something pretty important: When it comes to winning lottery tickets, I am sitting on a big one. I am a straight, white, male, born during the most prosperous time, on the most prosperous continent of all time. Ever. We white males, straight, born in Massachusetts control an obscene amount of that wealth.
When bad things happen to me, like, enough water in my house to put out two Great Chicago Fires, they are merely inconvenient. There was someone fixing my house just minutes after the water stopped. No less than five friends have asked: need a place to stay? This happens when ever I get into even a little bit of trouble.
For most people on this planet this is not even close to the case. I could point you to a million sites that will tell you how bad life is for a lot of people. 80% of the world’s population is living on $10 a day. While 1.6 billion have never had any access to electricity, much less known what it is to be without it in a few rooms. Matt Shepard lost his life just ten years ago, in a real gross way, for liking men.
We could go over all of this ad nausea. I don’t blame myself for these troubles, but I sure am thankful to not count them amongst mine.
I’ll probably get busy again and take things for granted. But every once in a while it is real nice to be reminded why I don’t play the lottery. It’s because I’ve already won in so many ways.
