"Luck"

This essay had its genesis in an idea about writing of the good the United States has done over the years, and the sadness that we have become so polarized and divided. Christopher Buskirk, publisher and editor of American Greatness and opinion writer for the New York Times, recently wrote an essay, “The Vital Nation.” In it he wrote that “civilizational vitality springs from a shared identity that unites people.” Paul Johnson, the British historian who recently died at the age 94, wrote last April in The Spectator: “What is America? It is not a race but a cohesion of all the races of the world.” E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one – the motto on the United States’ Great seal. 

 

We used to think of ourselves that way, as individuals thrown into an American mixing bowl. Today, we see ourselves separated by identity, as in a salad bowl where the radishes do mot mingle with the tomatoes. The U.S. has its share of blemishes, we are far from perfect, but what other country has provided opportunities to so many from so many different parts of the world? I, for one, thank God that I had the good fortune to be born here, and that is how this essay came to be written.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Luck”

January 28, 2023

 

“Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind.

Listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.”

Attributed to Eubie Blake (1887-1983)

American pianist and composer

 

Tuesday will be my 82^nd birthday. So, forgive me if I wax nostalgic. I promise to be short. 

 

Luck is happenstance. Good or bad, it cannot be summoned or dismissed at will. It is, however, often denigrated. In his 1860 book of essays, The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” I presume Emerson meant that effort was necessary for fortune. There is no question that, individually, we make our own luck, in aspiration, diligence, and hard work. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” Yet, so much happens in our lives – for better or worse – for which we bear no responsibility: the families and places into which we are born, accidents for which we have no fault, serendipitous meetings that lead to long and loving relationships.

 

None of us chooses the time or place of our birth, nor do we select our parents. It is purely by chance, or luck, if you will. It is the right people meeting, going back tens of thousands of years. The odds of being born, whenever or wherever, are infinitesimal. The fact we are alive is reason to celebrate.

 

Fortune smiled upon me from the start, first in the parents I had. While both had been raised in comfortable circumstances, they chose a life of impecunious artists in a New Hampshire farmhouse that belonged to my father’s parents. There they raised nine children: “our nine little seedlings/all planted with love/nurtured with patience/from Heaven above,” as my mother wrote on their 25^th wedding anniversary. In an undated letter to the editor of the Peterborough Transcript (probably from the mid 1950s), she wrote of parenting: “Children have to learn and learn young what goes and what doesn’t go…Our formula is lots of love, lots of sleep, and lots of time to themselves, with a good spanking when it is necessary.”

 

In another stroke of fortune, I met Caroline sixty-one years ago; we fell in love and were married on April 11, 1964. And the two of us were blessed with three children who, in turn, produced ten grandchildren. If that’s not luck, I don’t know what is. 

 

Of all times to have been born, I was lucky, even as the runway gets shorter. I look at the comforts of today versus what was available to those of yesterday; the leisure time we have, something unknown to prior generations; of the ability to travel anywhere and to easily communicate with family and friends; of the advances in medicine, which have stretched our lives; and of the relative peace our world has enjoyed. 

 

And, of all places to be born, I was fortunate to have been born in the United States. As Baxter Black, the late cowboy, veterinarian, and poet wrote in 2008: “I’m lucky to be an American, and the freedom that I have.”  It has become popular to accentuate our nation’s faults and minimize her virtues. She is not perfect – “pay the thunder no mind” – but she remains the preferred destination of those wishing to emigrate from other countries all over the world – “listen to the birds.” I am lucky to have been born in the U.S. of A.