The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

I have my unlucky aspects of course. I have arthritis, after all, asthma and high blood pressure.  However, the way I look at it, I am lucky to live at a time when all these afflictions can be ameliorated. My asthma, with the help of new medication, is symptom-free at present. My arthritis is being pretty well taken care of by anti-inflammatories. I take a pill for my blood pressure which keeps it perfectly normal. Even my bad knee has been able to be replaced by an artificial knee. And although I got infection when I had my knee done, I was able to get a bed immediately upon its being discovered, when apparently only a week before  the hospital had no rooms free at all.

Other things I am lucky about are things I mentioned in my last two blog entries. As well, although I have only won something twice in my life, I consider myself lucky nonetheless. Some people never win anything, after all. I won a poetry  book when I was about twelve that became a source of my love of poetry. It had all the classics in it, including “The Highwayman”, “Someone Came Knocking”, “The Elf and the Toadstool”, and many others. It was also illustrated nicely. The second time I won something was when Pasley was at the Priory School. I bought several tickets for a draw they had on Sports Day, and won two ticket for anywhere Air Canada flew. We had been on strike, so we didn’t have much money, and had thought we wouldn’t be able to go to Vancouver that summer as we did at that time; we used the tickets for that.

But there have been other instances of luck that weren’t involved in the drawing of tickets. Times when people have been kind and generous to me, and have helped me when they didn’t need to. In England, when Paze was 15 and we were renting two dilfferent English country cottages for a few weeks in two different places in southern England, Devon and Dartmoor, and discovered that ‘good location for touring’ meant ‘if you have a car’, we were returning once from a trip to Plymouth and arrived at the train station nearest us only to find that the last bus had already gone. A taxi driver said he’d come back for us once he drove another fare to where they were going. Night fell around us, and I was thinking to myself that we might just have to walk into the nearest town and stay at the hotel whose sign I could see—when, there he was, almost an hour later, as he’d said he’d be.  Was that because I was lucky? Because I was a woman with a teenage daughter? Because he was a gallant or old fashioned Brit who lived up to his word on matters? Or just because we represented another fare for the driver? I’ll never know.  Paze and I found similar helpfulness in New York when we went down there for a weekend. In a city we had heard was cold, people gave us directions left and right. 

Pasley and I were lucky in France, too, about twelve years ago.  We traveled outside Paris to see Monet’s place in Giverny, the famous gardens he painted so often. Not until we got there did we realize that we’d each been given a one way ticket instead of the round trip ticket we thought we’d purchased. And at the same time I learned that my debit card wasn’t working in the ATM machine at Giverny. That meant we didn’t have any money to buy tickets at the station for the return trip to Paris. We had enough pocket change to take a bus to the station. When we got on the train to Paris, I decided that we’d throw ourselves on the mercy of the conductor when he came around to collect our tickets. I also remembered that, on our trip  to Giverney, no one had come around to collect our tickets. Well, Pasley immediately fell asleep, but I sat there, worrying, all the way to Paris, but, luckily enough, no one came to get a ticket. I’m surprised anyone buys tickets for the train if this is what happens frequently. (And by the way, when we got to Paris, I luckily discovered that my card worked fine in the ATMs there.)

Before my knee surgery, I went to see my GP to ask him if there was anything  I could do to boost my stamina. I was wondering if I’d be able to take knee surgery, since I seemed to be so weak and unenergetic. He assured me that I would be okay, then asked me if I was a lucky person or not. I said I was, and he said that in that case, I’d probably have a good outcome. I guess he meant that if I was the kind of person who considers myself lucky, I was probably the type who would  find something lucky about my outcome—as I have proven above that I did, despite my infection. That’s probably what lucky is, the emphasizing of the positive. I have to say that I trained myself to be positive, a real Pollyanna type, when I was suffering from depression in my twenties. I had read somewhere that if you tried to find the positive side to things, you would banish depression. Well, I have been doing this ever since, albeit with the help of anti-depressants, which aren’t enough in themselves to work, I find. I have pretty well passed this tendency on to Paze, who has passed it on to Devon. The other day, when Devon came over as we were mopping up the water in our stairwell, she said, “Well, at least this means that your stairs got really clean,” showing that she has learned her lesson well.

For all this, I am grateful.