As Luck Would Have It

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

-Orson Welles

If you had asked me back then, I would probably have said that there was nothing unusual about that particular day in July of 1973, when I sat on our porch reading and enjoying the warmth of the summer morning, not to mention the realization that there were six more weeks until my vacation would end and I'd be star
t
ing middle school.  First I noticed the moving van turn the corner onto our street and stop with brakes squealing in front of the Silverstein's place, three houses down from ours.  Then came the Chevy station wagon with the wooden panels on the side that I doubt were really wood, but more likely Formica or plastic or whatever they made those things out of.  This was before the age of the SUV and the station wagon was the ultimate family vehicle, fully capable of hauling around the kids and almost anything else you might take along on
a short outing or
even a long vacation.  Unresponsive and unexciting to even a modest automobile enthusiast, its practical advantages were easily sold to the American
car
buyer who had little experience or interest in any sort of
vehicle
that wasn't rolled off one of Detroit's assembly lines.

My father drove a small sedan b
ecause even when the oil flowed cheaply and
with no end in sight, he
didn’t like the idea of wasting anything, gasoline included.  And then there was the fact
that I was an only child and the Dodge Dart we had was more than enough for our family in terms of its dimensions.  It lacked both power and power steering, and he drove it with the driver's side window all the way down in the summer
time
, since air conditioning was not on my parent's list of must haves when they picked it
off
the used car lot the year before.  If things had turned out differently, they probably would have owned a big car something not unlike the one our new neighbors had pulled up in, since they had always wanted a large family.

Their dream to raise at least three or
four children with a dog, or maybe
a cat, or worst case a canary and a couple of hamsters was never to materialize, and I knew what a disappointment that must have been for them even if I was not that much affected by it.  As things were to turn out, it was probably for the best that I never had siblings, but no one could have predicted what was to come, or for that matter, convince them that the three of us should be enough of a family unit.  My mother had a history of scarred ovaries and was burdened with two miscarriages after I was born.  Eventually, the doctors were to advise them to give up and recommend surgery that would both tie up her tubes and extinguish their dreams.

I considered myself lucky to be an only child, given that there were no siblings around to break my toys, leave me hand-me-downs, or otherwise get in the way of my parents' attention and affection.  I liked not having to hide my baseball glove so as to not have it snatched by an older brother, or worse, having the quiet of the house invaded by a sister's unruly and annoying friends.

I
squinted in the morning sun and watched as the family moving in down the block was unloading the back of the wagon.  As luck would have it, there was a boy who looked to be about my age carrying a backpack and a basketball into the house.  He came over after a few minutes and
we
shook hands.  I’m Joseph Klein, we just moved in down the street.  Hi, I’m Clifford Andrews.  He had wavy reddish hair and a crooked smile with a slightly chipped tooth that gave him a somewhat odd look, not in a bad way at all, just a little different.  He was a bit on the effeminate side, but had a confident way about him that I noticed right off.  I liked him immediately.  Do you play baseball, Joseph?  Yeah, but I'm not very good at it, I remember him saying.

I was born on December 8, 1960 in the town of Mayfield, about 2
0
miles outside of Chicago, a suburb by that time though it had once been an independent city.  My parents had moved to the large four bedroom house right after they were married; more space in which to raise the big family they were never going to have.  Neither of them would live to see an advanced age, though I have such clear memories of them even now, some 50 years later, right up until
all hell
would be unleashed onto my life.

My parents took a somewhat dim view of television, preferring that I make better use of my leisure time by reading or taking walks by the lake, so all we had was a black and white TV with a picture that flickered more or less in concurrence with the weather conditions.  Joseph's family had not one, but two color
televisions
, with an antenna on their roof no less; so I would spend a lot of time in their family room watching the Blackhawks or Bears games instead of trying
to
view them in our living room, endlessly fiddling with the rabbit ears that could never be adjusted just right.

As I mentioned, the Kleins had a big station wagon with the wooden paneling on the sides that was actually considered quite
stylish ba
ck then, though by 2020 the odds of seeing such a thing outside of a museum or a long-abandoned junk yard were slim.  We loved riding in the back area, where the space seemed almost unlimited for both of us and everything we wanted to take along on an outing.  Mom, can Clifford come with us to the park on Saturday?  He can, as long as it's OK with Mrs. Andrews.

It was usually OK with them because my parents were fairly lenient with me, and I
think took pride in allowing me a
great deal of independence for someone my age.  They were quit
e
firm in their belief that I should not be unnecessarily constrained, and
pr
obably quite happy that I wasn't constantly hanging around the house.  I had no real way of contemplating how things really were for my parents, what difficult issues they may have had to face, or how I might possibly find my way without them.

I loved those trips to Emerson Lake with the Kleins in the
ir station wagon.
  Even with Joseph's brother Richard and their dog Boog, and occasionally a cousin or two as well, there was plenty of room for us.  We'd often ride unrestrained in the cargo area, which would be considered
borderline
child abuse today, but in those days the back seats didn't even have seat belts in some models.  Way in the back the ride was loud and harsh, but Joseph and I loved it.  We couldn't have dreamed up the heated leather seats and Bose surround sound systems that would characterize our motoring experiences later on.  Soon Detroit would have to accede to the reality that many of us would be driving foreign cars instead of the home grown variety, but in 1973, all but the most eccentric of drivers seemed quite content with their Chevys and Fords, lumbering happily along on the Interstates heading wherever it was that we were going.

*****

I am an extremely lucky person, which clearly did not seem to have any genetic component, as we will see later with respect to my parents, who seemed to be to be anything but.  I am not lucky the way most people might think of it.  I will never win the lottery, though I like to play it just for fun.  I love roulette and the slot machines in casinos.  The sounds, the colorful tables and the excitement and hopeful chatter of the places are enough to attract me, without the slightest anticipation that I might actually walk away with even a modest winning.  I've gone to bet on horses any number of times and have never even once picked a winner.

It's not that I don't think you can win at these things, you clearly can.  I read recently about a woman
who
won large lottery jackpots five times over the past 17 years. These were long-odds
winnings
that totaled more than 20 million dollars.  More amazingly, at least two of her winning tickets were purchased in the same convenience store.  The article was titled "Woman Defies the Odds".  I, on the other hand, exemplify the odds.  The reason she can win so many times is that she is getting some of my
winning tickets
for some unknown reason.  The guy sitting next to me at the
horse
race doesn't know any more about horses than you or me, yet he keeps right on winning
,
while my horse stumbles a bit coming out of the gate and never catches up.  Through cosmic influence or intuition or whatever, he
too
is
plucking some of
my chances away from me.  So you might wonder; how can I say that I am extremely lucky?  Aren't the horse racing guy next to me and the lottery freak luckier than me?  And shouldn't I be pissed off that they are stealing my chances?  Not one bit. 

My luck originates from a completely different type of entitlement.  We could speculate forever about where it comes from or whether or not I deserve it, but by the age of 60, I hadn't even been sick beyond a minor sore throat, at least not since I was about ten years old and came down with an awful case of the flu.  I had never broken a bone or been in a car accident either and I more or less cruised through school and almost 25 years in my current job without having to do much in the way of work.  My seemingly near perfect health comes as a result of me not doing anything in particular to promote it.  I go to the gym and try to maintain my weight, but I eat pretty much whatever I feel like, and I have a weakness for expensive Scotch whisky.  I have a nasty smoking habit that I have never been able to kick, even though I've tried
,
and I am somewhat disgusted by the smell of it and by other smokers as well.  I can't even remember the last time I was constipated or had a headache, other than from a hangover, which is the closest thing I've had to what you might consider a medical condition. 

My good fortune does not end with my unlikely avoidance of human disease.  But for one very notable exception, which we will learn about later on, nothing particularly bad had happened to me ever, that is until December 8 when my world was fractured into pieces that I thought at the time would be too small and jagged to reconstruct.

I got through both high school and college as if I was on automatic pilot, that is I never really attempted to steer myself onto any specific academic path, or towards any particular career goal.  My grades were usually
decent,
though I can't remember studying all that much and I don' know why the teachers let me off easy much of the time.  Clifford, do you have your book report ready to turn in?  Sorry Mrs. Worthy, I'm almost done
,
can I turn it in on Monday?  What teacher, presumably both educated and somewhat of an expert when it came to the manipulative workings of a teenager's mind would fall for that?  I hadn't even started the 400 or so pages of
A Tale of Two Cities
, so it's a good thing that Mrs. Worthy didn't ask how far along I was with my reading, or what my impressions were of Dickens' florid style or his dominant social sensibilities.  With just a weekend to put something together, how was it possible that I managed a B+ on the assignment?  When it all ended with the prom in 1978, I had managed an acceptance into the undergrad
uate
program at Southern Illinois University, which it turned out to be, not by pure coincidence I'm sure, the same school that Joseph had first selected, though he was very smart and with excellent grades, so eventually his parents were able to talk him into Northwestern instead.