Ron's Blog

When I was five years old, I went to the dentist and discovered that I had four cavities that needed fillings. This was a bit unusual because the cavities were located on the exterior surface of my canine teeth, the fang-like teeth at the corner of my mouth. Luckily, even in Appalachia, the dentist had the skills to treat the cavities. However, back then, fillings were made of silver-colored amalgam. So, unluckily, this meant that my charming cherubic smile would be marred by four prominent silver dots. Can you imagine how many times I heard, “You’ve got something in your teeth”?

A year after getting my fillings, I was showing my sister how well I could do a summersault on the couch. For this specific feat, I would kneel on the arm of the couch, roll headfirst along the cushions, and leap to my feet at the other end. However, somehow, my body got sideways and when I came out of the roll, I was headed towards the coffee table. And by “headed,” I mean “headed.” Luckily, the corner of the table broke my fall. Unluckily, it knocked out one of my infamous canine teeth and cut my lip which required a visit to the doctor and a stitch to close it up. Luckily, it did reduce my obnoxiously obvious amalgam fillings by one.

When I was about eight, I was again showing off my gymnastic skills to a visitor in our home. This was pretty typical behavior for me as I believed I had quite an extraordinary ability to entertain people not only with my wry wit but with feats of acrobatics as well. On this particular occasion, I balanced myself in the hallway between the edge of the stairs and the edge of a cupboard. I pretended that they were parallel bars and I would swing my legs back and forth without falling. The problem was, I forgot the “without falling” part. My hands slipped at the same time and once again, with almost perfect precision, I chinned (a slight directional variation of “headed”) towards the floor. Luckily, I was only three feet above the ground. Unluckily, the impact led to three stitches in my chin while the remaining three amalgamated canines survived the fall. Luckily, they fell out on their own a few months later.

The next two years of my life were somewhat uneventful. I had the typical scraped knees, bee stings, and bumped noggins that young boys get. Luckily, there were no other major issues. Then one fall day when I was ten years old, after skipping church earlier in the day (never a good omen), I was walking up our rural two-lane road when an older gentleman misjudged the amount of space between me and an oncoming car. He opted to hit me rather than risk car-on-car damage to his front fender. Unluckily, the impact broke my femur and landed me in the hospital for five weeks. Further unluckiness led to a one-and-a-half leg cast for six weeks and crutches for another three. Luckily, I was given a great deal of attention while I recuperated. In fact, once I had healed, my parents rewarded me for all the trauma I had endured by giving me a minibike. In hindsight, it was as if they said, “We’re sorry you were in an accident so here’s a way for you to be in another one.”

At this point in my life, I began to wonder if I had walked under one too many ladders, had inadvertently broken a mirror, or that our pet black cat was piling up bad luck on me one day after another. It seemed that I was a magnet for unluckiness.

My path through high school, college, and early adulthood was similar. I had a couple of knee surgeries and several sports-related injuries. Then, when I hit my middle-age years, I bought the obligatory Harley Davidson motorcycle. One weekend, I was on a ride when a man driving a pickup truck pulled out in front of me. I swerved to miss him, ran off the road, and crashed my bike. Unluckily, my Harley was totaled. Luckily, I was not. I did get ten stitches in my chin which conveniently covered the previous scar from my gymnastics floor encounter. I considered that an economic use of chin space.

When we moved back to Central Virginia a few years ago, I felt lucky that we finally lived in an area where I could ride my motorcycle on beautiful scenic roads and not encounter a lot of traffic. Unluckily, six months after we moved here, I found myself in an emergency room with no idea of how I got there. My wife informed me that I had been in yet another motorcycle accident and unluckily, had hit my head. The concussion left me with no memory of the accident nor the five hours afterwards. Luckily, I had no other serious injuries. Unluckily, I no longer had a motorcycle. Or is that luckily? You be the judge.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago when I discovered that a squamous cell skin cancer that had been removed from my cheek had unluckily metastasized into my lymph system and accumulated in a large area of my neck. Luckily, it’s somewhat localized and has not spread to other parts of my body. Unluckily, it required an extensive neck surgery that will be followed with radiation and immunotherapy.

As I’m going through all of this, I keep pondering the same question I have asked myself throughout my life: Am I prone to unluckiness or am I actually lucky that I have survived all of the unluckiness I have encountered?

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s neither. It’s just the way life works. We may consider ourselves unlucky but there will always be people who are worse off than we are. And while we may feel lucky at times, luck probably had nothing to do with whatever we experienced. Perhaps we need to stop trying to find the “why” for everything and just settle in and accept whatever “is”.

If we allow ourselves to view the bumps, falls, and accidents of our lives as nothing unusual that only happens to us, then we won’t get caught up in seeing ourselves as lucky or unlucky. We’ll realize that it is simply part of “life-y”.