Although a number of people, like ourselves, were saddened by the damage, we returned to a large chorus of surprisingly jubilant townspeople. “You’re lucky you were away,” these good folk unanimously agreed. Lucky? I couldn’t help but notice that the tornado had thrown half of a tall white pine onto our roof, denting a new ceiling and smashing an antique glass light onto a newly (and now not so nicely) varnished bedroom floor. “Well, you’re lucky the tree missed that skylight on the porch,” our neighbors explained.
Soon I was also urged to enthuse about the other half of the tree, which had fallen in front of our house. More luck. It missed my car. “It could have been so much worse!” they insisted. Well, yes. It could have fallen on our heads. Or mashed us to tomato paste from the knees down. “I can’t get over how lucky we were that nobody here was killed,” said one flushed housewife, profusely thanking her deity for his restraint after clear-cutting the hill opposite her home. I, too, was glad the tornado killed nobody. But it’s the least I’d expect from a merciful god, not a special treat.
Anyway, our torrential good luck continued. I was recently working in my home office, trying to ignore the roofers as they repaired the tornado damage (“luckily,” we were insured), when a cascade of crashes and thunks broke my trance. Sounds like more of that fantastic Bluestone luck, I thought. And, sure enough, I walked out onto the porch and, well–remember that skylight we were so lucky that the tree didn’t hit? It was lying all over the porch, intertwined romantically with the bundle of shingles that had plunged through it when the roofer’s support had broken. To my left was an annoying six-foot-high woodpile, whose proximity to our porch forces you to walk under dripping eaves. But now, it turns out, stacking the woodpile too close was “lucky.” Why? Because the roofer who fell off our roof landed on it, unhurt.
“Lucky that woodpile was there, or I’d have broken my neck,” said he.
“Lucky you didn’t go through that skylight,” I replied, by now catching on.
“Yep,” he agreed. “If I’d a done that I’d still be layin’ there.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t sue you for every cent you own,” pointed out another one of our neighbors, later. But he’s an ex-New Yorker.
No matter how I slice it, “lucky” to me will always mean having no tornado in my yard, not a less-than-apocalyptic tornado in my yard. Still, I had to admit, we were lucky the tornado wasn’t carrying rags soaked in plague. We’re lucky it didn’t blow a freight car full of nitric acid into the nearby Delaware River. On a more modest scale, we were lucky that the tornado hit us so randomly, instead of striking only the homes of weekenders, gays or the poor. Had it discriminated in harmony with any of the many local prejudices, who knows what bizarre social damage it would have done? So, mulling over the whole “luck” business, I could see some advantages to the Bluestone perspective. Viewed the Bluestone way, in fact, a person’s luck can be delightfully limitless.
As I tallied up my wealth of good fortune, I began to wonder if this manic, slightly loony brand of luck isn’t somewhat new for America. Bluestone optimism isn’t the same as the more traditional sense of national denial to which Pollyanna lends her name. Bluestone luck creates the illusion of a bright new day by painting dark shadows around each of our pancakes, rather than drowning them in rivulets of glistening syrup. It is more energized by disaster than, say, the Mediterranean’s que sera, sera, or the Muslim metaphysical shoulder-shrug, “It is the will of Allah.” With Yankee ingenuity, we have begun to transmute our fearful, anxious thoughts into renewable gratitude.
Perhaps our weird new optimism has something to do with September 11, a tornado of another sort. After that, there was simply no way to insist that “the Dow is headed for 30,000!” Here in Bluestone, we sense that no matter what America does next, we’re in for more nasty weather. In the backwaters of influence, about the best we can do with our luck right now is to “define it down.” So we say, “It could have been so much worse.” Lucky we thought to do that, I’d guess.
