Okay, so it took me longer than I wanted to before I got back here, but here we are again. Last time I mentioned that I had started reading “The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco, and I am still trying to wade my way through the beginning of it. There is just something about the way that he writes his fiction that I find difficult to get through, but I am determined to do it this time, so I am going to stick with it. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

My intent is to start getting into some baseball stuff tomorrow, so I am going to try to stick to that and really get to it then. I have thousands of autographs to choose from to start with, and some of the players are kind of obscure but they have interesting stories to them, so we’ll see who I decide to start things off with tomorrow.

So I guess I will get back to the question I asked with my last post, which was:

What do you think is the luckiest thing that has happened to you?

Most people had answers within the same realm that had to do with their spouse and children. I agree 100%, that is probably one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me. For me though, luck is kind of an odd thing. I have an awful lot that I think that has been lucky in my life. Of course, meeting Michelle and ending up marrying her is at the top of the list. When you think about it really, the odds of any of us meeting a person, falling in love with them and marrying them takes a tremendous amount of luck. I know my family came close to moving away from here when I was in high school, which would have taken me away from the area and Michelle and I would never have started dating. It all fell through, but it came pretty close to happening. The same happened to Michelle’s family. The fact that it didn’t and we ended up going from friends to close friends to dating to marrying seems like an awful lot of lucky things falling into place at the right time.

For me, it seems that a lot of things like that have happened. To get right down to it, maybe it is all luck that I am still alive. I somehow got through a sickness when other people in the hospital who were sick like me were not surviving. Do I think other things were involved in that besides luck?Absolutely. I think there was a lot of faith, prayer, good will and hard work from a lot of different people who all came together to make it possible for me to live and recover to the point I have. I also think that there had to be some luck involved in that too though. The doctors tried a treatment they had never attempted before and were hoping it would work. They didn’t know for sure that it would, so there was something else going on there, whether it was luck or divine intervention.

Besides that whole thing, I feel like I am pretty lucky person besides all that. I also me besides the usual things of having a loving wife and son, great family and friends, a roof over my head, food to eat and things like that. The fact that I get to write every day as a job to me is completely lucky for me. The more I thought about all this, I also seem to have some luck at winning things. I always used to complain that I never won anything, until about 15 years or so ago when I won $1,800 on a slot machine in Atlantic City and then a few minutes later won another $300 on another machine. I won the trip to Ireland from Guinness. Then I have won a bunch of little contests, winning books, gift cards, t-shirts, baseballs and things like that. Everyone keeps waiting for the big payoff when I win the lottery but I tell people I already did (actually, when I was in the coma, one of the things I remember happening was me winning the lottery, but that’s a story for another day about the other life I led for 4 months).

So that’s my story about luck. Thank you to everyone who took the time to answer my question, and a special thanks to Les Stroud, Harry Shearer and Hank Azaria who took time to answer me on Twitter. if you happened to read my last post of fiction, called “Where There’s a Will…” it was part of a little fun thing that Sean and I are doing involving something called Storymatic. Well Sean drew two new cards tonight so here is the topic for our next piece:

A person covered in tattoos

A rest area

I think it certainly has some possibilities to go in a lot of directions. Hopefully Sean will write something about this one. He felt too stumped by the last one to do anything. We’ll see what the both of us can come up with. If you feel like participating, please feel free to do so. You don’t have to write anything long, it could just be a few sentences if that’s all you want, or even a poem if that’s what you like, but feel free to play along and share your writing right here.

I’ll leave you this evening with the song of the day, since it’s really too late in the day for me to get into anything else. Today’s song of the day is:

The Temptations – Papa Was a Rolling Stone

I’ll be back tomorrow to add something new. I’ll do some baseball stuff, a new song of the day, and I did see a question I would like to ask everyone. Until then, have a great evening. Hope it’s a lucky one for you.