Dumb Luck

 

Sailors, if you can believe Patrick O'Brian, are superstitious. They believe in luck and they believe in things which can bring bad luck. They are at the mercy of storms which seem to blow in from nowhere, for no good reason, and it is understandable they might focus on the uncontrollable. 

Athletes, especially baseball players, are superstitious. In sports where success or failure is more controllable, like wrestling and football, players tend to be less superstitious, but baseball has a lot in it which is not in the player's control. The Phantom played baseball through the end of his sixth decade and he went to the batting cages regularly, and he was able to train himself to hit fast balls, but he could get five at bats in a game and never see a good pitch to hit. But sometimes, there it was, and he could pounce. More than half the time, though, it was just dumb luck whether he saw a good pitch. 

Driving down the road to southern Maryland, with his wife and kids in the car, the Phantom saw a wheel cover detach from a car maybe thirty yards ahead of him, and the wheel spun on its edges, zipping up the banked road side and then wheeling around and coming right back down again, crossing the Phantom's path, traveling underneath his car with a metallic clank. When he got back home, hours later, the Phantom found that wheel cover had lacerated the undercarriage beneath the transmission and what was left of the pink transmission fluid was dripping out and the transmission, and the car was toast. Dumb luck. The fickle finger of fate. God did not want the Phantom to drive a Honda Odyssey.

Every time you get on an airplane, there is that whole world of uncontrollable.

Forty-nine years ago, the Phantom was driving down a country road in southern Rhode Island and along the side of the road was a sort of garage sale, minus the garage and the Phantom spotted a wooden desk chair that looked serviceable and had some character. He plopped down some affordable amount of cash, maybe $25, loaded the chair into his car and that chair moved with him from Southern Rhode Island to Providence, to New Haven, to Washington, D.C, and ultimately to New Hampshire and he uses it to this day, and it still swivels.

                            Gabrielle Munter 

The chair turns out to be a W.H. Gunlocke chair, made in Wayland, New York. This company made chairs for multiple Presidents, for libraries and executive offices from 1902 until 2026, which will be the last year it produces chairs. For 49 years, it has seated the Phantom comfortably, admirably. Just happened to spot it driving down the road, just happened to have cash, just happened to shrug off the wife's objections to buying that old piece of junk.

Dumb luck.