I was driving to work this morning in the cold and gray, cursing Portland’s quotation marks around “summer” and trying to breathe through the thumps of anxiety in my chest. Everything felt desperate and impossible. Felt like I’d never again be able to animate the muscles of my face.
I stopped at a light on MLK. The woman in the left lane plowed halfway into the pedestrian walkway before cruising to an unreliable halt. A dark-haired young woman crossing the street unscrewed her water bottle and, without breaking her sauntering stride or her forward gaze, casually upended the bottle over the hood of the intrusive car, drizzling her opinion from one headlight to the other. The serene and spontaneous choreography of her rebuke was breathtaking. It knocked a one-note laugh out of me and loosened my breathing.
When traffic began moving again, a station wagon pulled ahead in the left lane and I found myself gazing at a bumper sticker that read:
In case of emergency, please take occupants of car to Legacy Emmanuel Hospital
Ghastly forethought? Sensibly ghoulish? So many vivid images of headline news, ER urgency and emotional turmoil compressed in that little zip file. And here we all are on MLK, in our cars and on our bikes and hurrying fragiley around on our feet, and so far, in this moment, this Emergency has not cropped up. But there’s that small, sensible message, in a non-incendiary font, waiting in the wings to clean up a mess that hasn’t happened yet. One sort of mess that could happen. Biting off a tiny piece of unknowable chaos and sticking a tiny plan on it.
Anyway, in short order, another station wagon edged up, emblazoned with another bumper sticker. This one said:
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
Which made me laugh again, an airy little snort with a bouquet of Douglas Adams mixed with antipathy for histrionics, and a bass note of appreciation for people who share their silliness with you just because they can.
And then tonight I went out for sushi, and for some American-style, pan-Asian reason, the meal ended with a fortune cookie. My little slip of fortune made this remarkable assertion:
This is a lucky time for you – take a risk.
So those were my fortunes today. And I’m not sure I started this essay with a Topic Sentence, but I can offer my own tentative Conclusion for the day, which is this: clearly, you never know what luck will look like. Mine is certainly appearing in some surprising guises these days. And all I can recommend is: take a look around, you might be having some right now.
Deborah
This one in a fresh vegetable store this morning:
“Unattended children will be given a cup of expresso and a puppy.”