Luck in Your Own Backyard

Three things have occupied my thoughts lately:  I'll soon be thirty, the latest stage of my life to feel like "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" seems to be passing, and I miss my grandparents.

The framed four-leaf clover in the drawing above is my rendition of the real one that has a place here on my desk. I look at it every day and think about luck and its place in my life. My grandfather used to search his backyard for four-leaf clovers for me. He would sit at the base of his thinking tree and study the grass until he spotted one. There was always a lucky clover from Papa being pressed in a book, waiting for me to claim upon my next visit. I would take each one home and carefully tape it into my Bible, the only place that seemed right for such a collection. When I had a falling-out with God while in college, I threw out the Bible--and seemingly, all the good luck it contained. If my thirties see fewer moments of such reckless stupidity than my twenties did, we should all be glad.

I have gotten through the six years without my grandparents, of course, but I can't help but think that they all would have been easier had my grandparents been here for them. When I returned home from a failed grad school venture, it was Papa's spin on the events that most helped me. "A nice girl like you, you move to a big city and they treat you like that! But you tried! People who don't make mistakes don't make anything." He died four months later, so I never got to hear his take on any of the many twists and turns that followed. I never got to ask him what he thought of luck or if he considered himself lucky. He and his family had come to America from northern Italy when he was a boy--"America! Where the streets are paved in gold!"--and his mother died a few years later. He was always sure after that that he, too, would die young. A decade later, he and my grandmother met, somehow strangers to each other in a mining village of a few hundred people. Early in their marriage, Papa contracted Black Lung and was told to put his affairs in order and make arrangements for his family. He lived to almost-90 and celebrated more than six decades of marriage. As Joe says in Force of Evil, "You can't tell about your life 'til you're all through living it." By 2001, Papa had lived long enough to know that he never could have guessed how his life would unfold or what the "better or worse" that he had vowed to be there for would actually entail. Six years and countless highs and lows later, when I think of Papa and his lucky clovers, I ache to tell him that--even if the collection is gone--I'm beginning to get it.

After Papa died, I flipped through the pages of a book I'd taken from his and Grandma's house and found a four-leaf clover pressed inside. I promptly framed it and set it next to my favorite photo of us and promised not to be as careless as before. Maybe that wasn't necessary. Maybe luck, like love, never really leaves us. But still and all, maybe Papa knew that his granddaughter would sometimes need to be reminded that, regardless of what life held for her, she would always be one of the luckiest people in the world.