Luck...

For no reason I can fathom, when I was young I considered myself lucky, using the term vaguely as when we say someone, generally very old or rather homely, is attractive.

Actually, the fact is that no one in my extended family is lucky, or ever has been lucky, with the exception of a single cousin. He was considered so because he managed to pay for his Yale medical training entirely through his poker winnings, was the only survivor of a horrendous car crash, married a millionaire's daughter, had six sons who each had a million dollar trust fund, lived in a cantilevered glass house in Marin and had his own vineyard. He is also stunningly handsome and extremely nice. I count him one lucky son of a bitch and I don't think too many would argue with me.

So it's a mystery I can't quite divine, this foggy sense of luck I lugged around for so many years. Perhaps, as many young people do, I confused being lucky with not being unlucky. I came from humorous intelligent parents who liked to read, which, to my way of thinking, is enough to constitute perfection. I had nice enough boyfriends, a series of terrific dogs and many good cats, travelled a bit, was a size 7 most of my life, and had naturally wavy hair. But then, as I've said, I was young.

I had not yet seen my mother die by inches of breast cancer, I had not yet lived in a freezing bewilderment as my first husband went nuts, I had not been mugged yet and gotten a titanium hip as a result, and my father had not yet fallen over with a massive heart attack.

Quite simply, life had not happened to me. Yet.

Since then, I've sat at a number of death beds, lost friends to terrible diseases, and had my own share of Bad Things but why go on? It's life, as we always say, rather oddly I think, since it's more often death. There is a consolation to all this grimness that starts piling on in middle age and just keeps coming. The consolation prize, and a good one it is, is that not much scares you. Not anymore.

So last Saturday, a week ago, in fact, when my husband of 31 years said, I feel really strange and, when I looked at him, I saw he was having a stroke. In my memory his skin is entirely gray and one half of him is pulled down like something from a horror movie. But I know enough to distrust memory. At that moment, I only knew he was having a stroke and that we didn't have much time. He could talk but not walk or use his left arm, and he didn't want me to call 911 because ambulances are so expensive. Thirty minutes had gone by with the ambulance conversation and I decided fuck it and dialed 911. Right now I'd give a lot to get those 30 minutes back. But it is what it is, as we keep saying to one another.

It's not luck exactly. But he's alive. And for me, that's quite enough.

That's a lot.