Words for luck

You are dumb, you are a fallacy of probability, taken as a love note or a hex. You are cheap like cartoon leprechauns; like marshmallow rainbows and gold-plated slot machines; like grandmothers soliciting, in voices that must be better suited elsewhere, Cocktail? Cocktail?

You are a four letter word. Even Frank Sinatra begged you, Be a lady. Tonight. One can only wonder what he thought you were on other nights.

My husband and I called ourselves lucky when our daughter was born: ten fingers and ten toes, crying with healthy lungs. Other pregnancies were less endowed with your present: your presence. Or, so we thought, once. Our first pregnancy ended in a burial service, and afterwards we drove into the mountains. On the way we passed pop-warner games and proud parents, and we were silent. As we climbed Palomar mountain, there was no way not to notice how the clouds seemed to hover like the cotton of a storybook angel’s embrace. We were fools looking for reasons to breathe, as if not doing so were an option. We drove from mountains into desert, passing ocotillo, prickly pear, sand verbena, and the lance-leaved live-forever. We drove beneath bald eagles, condors and red-tailed hawks. We drove past miles of arid, desert wastelands, and these were framed by the mountains that towered in the distance above us, like a congregation of wise ancients.

We are all of us creatures of your caprices, playthings of your will. You come and go: like wind and rain, babies and death; like fortune, like homelessness, like drowned bodies on a shore, and families reunited in a shelter. To everything there is a season, but to every season, you.

Better to call you dumb, perhaps; better to make you cheap. If you are intelligent, if you are a wealth of everything there is to offer, then we cannot help but wonder about your purpose, in painful and infuriating contortions.

You are neither cheap nor elegant. You are not vengeful or benevolent. You are drowning us, allowing us to breathe; the air we cannot see because it holds us up; the water that’s invisible to swimming fish. Count ourselves? We couldn’t, anymore than we could presume to call you by your proper name.

We cast dreams into the future like fishing nets, and we call on you to make them full.

***

A note about this post: Thanks to Meryl Jaffe, Ph.D. for recommending the Theme Thursday blog as a source of inspiration. I have been dulled by exhaustion this week, and I found it helpful to be challenged with a topic. Meryl’s blog, Departing the Text, can be found at: http://departingthetext.blogspot.com/.

Photo provided by Chaval Brasil on flickr under a Creative Commons license.