One Lady With A Lot of Luck
I’m a lucky girl. That fact has occurred to me before, but it’s never popped into my mind at the same time that my blog has, at least not until now. Anyway, it’s the truth, I’m lucky.
I was born a healthy baby girl in 1985. I spent my first twenty-one years living in Phoenix, Arizona. My mother, father, and even my brother are relatively normal people. There’s never been any need of anger management in the family. There is no insanity. None have a criminal record. Not even my brother is wanted by the police. All of that adds up to a lot of luck. More luck than most people would realize, that is, if they bothered to give it any thought. I could have been born in China. Worse, I could have been born in China in 1845. I probably would have worked the rice paddies, had six children, and died at the age of fifty-two, a toothless, arthritic woman. And that’s if everything went well. Worst case scenario is that I would have been born a month premature and died before taking a breath.
I might have been born in Nigeria in 600 A.D. To tell you the truth, I can’t even give you an inkling of what that life would have been like. I’m sure my childhood would have been worse than it was in a middle class neighborhood in Phoenix in the mid-1990s.
I live in Yuma now and when there is congested traffic I will sometimes get stuck at the same stop light for more than one cycle. It makes me mad. It makes me mad that I have to sit in complete comfort within an air-conditioned car for an extra forty-five seconds. Can you believe that? I ought to be ashamed of myself.
Out of all the human beings who ever lived on the planet, what percentage were,#1; born with perfect health, #2; into at least modest affluence, #3; in an industrialized nation, and finally #4; born since the development of vaccines and antibiotics? Is it one person in a thousand? Is it one person in every ten thousand?
See, that is why I never bother playing the Arizona lottery. I’ve already won the lottery, whether I stop to appreciate it or not.
I was born a healthy baby girl in 1985. I spent my first twenty-one years living in Phoenix, Arizona. My mother, father, and even my brother are relatively normal people. There’s never been any need of anger management in the family. There is no insanity. None have a criminal record. Not even my brother is wanted by the police. All of that adds up to a lot of luck. More luck than most people would realize, that is, if they bothered to give it any thought. I could have been born in China. Worse, I could have been born in China in 1845. I probably would have worked the rice paddies, had six children, and died at the age of fifty-two, a toothless, arthritic woman. And that’s if everything went well. Worst case scenario is that I would have been born a month premature and died before taking a breath.
I might have been born in Nigeria in 600 A.D. To tell you the truth, I can’t even give you an inkling of what that life would have been like. I’m sure my childhood would have been worse than it was in a middle class neighborhood in Phoenix in the mid-1990s.
I live in Yuma now and when there is congested traffic I will sometimes get stuck at the same stop light for more than one cycle. It makes me mad. It makes me mad that I have to sit in complete comfort within an air-conditioned car for an extra forty-five seconds. Can you believe that? I ought to be ashamed of myself.
Out of all the human beings who ever lived on the planet, what percentage were,#1; born with perfect health, #2; into at least modest affluence, #3; in an industrialized nation, and finally #4; born since the development of vaccines and antibiotics? Is it one person in a thousand? Is it one person in every ten thousand?
See, that is why I never bother playing the Arizona lottery. I’ve already won the lottery, whether I stop to appreciate it or not.
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