Lucky

Be comforted.  There can be no 6:66, neither AM or PM.  No 7:77 either, although it will be 13:13 once everyday.  The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia are both gone, so we don’t have to worry ever again about a catastrophe involving either one of them, thank God.  Martin Luther King Jr. is dead, and so are RFK and JFK, so we don’t have to worry in the future about losing a leader we love at the height of their success.  Of course there is George W. Bush, but I don’t know anybody who loves him.  Besides, the degree of his success, either now or at any other time, is eminently debatable.

Friday the thirteenth got me thinking about all this and it has only taken me 4 days to write it down.  Back in 1970, Apollo 13 got me thinking about it too, but that would mean that it took 35 and ten-twelveths years to write it down, and nothing has taken me that long to do, except maybe dying.  And I still haven’t done that.  Yet. 

I could be tied to a bed with a respirator tube anchored down my throat, firing its load of air into me, and pulling it back out again, once every five seconds.  I could be among the ‘disappeared’ in a torture camp in Europe or Asia, or Cuba.  I could have been crushed by the stampede at the Hajj.  Or worse yet, I could have survived it. 

Or more proximate to my actual reality, I could be suffering from one or more opportunistic infections, with my body hovering semi-viably between having a barely functioning immune system, and being a defenseless medium for the growth of exotic infectious diseases, like a petri dish.  Or I could suffer a bike accident, like when a lumbering giant–a massive snow plow or dump truck–backs into a snow bank where I was daintily squeezing past on my bicycle, leaving me compressed in a snow-pile, my limbs broken and tangled in a mass of bent frame pieces and red snow. 

But there is a joy in the experience, whatever it may be, whether an experience of suffering or an experience of death, no less than the joy in an experience of ecstasy.  No matter what we know, nor how absolutely we invest ourselves in what we prefer over that which we dislike, it is the capacity to know any of it at all which is, in the final analysis, the most precious, and the only gift.