How to be Lucky
I found the formula!
“When preparation meets opportunity, luck occurs.”
We were sitting at Sushi-Ya on the Sunset Strip, just down the street from his fancy office. The phrase was a lightning strike, that resounding hum of truth.
“That’s so profound!” I responded innocently, blinking my wide, wet, brown, doe-eyes. “Did you make that up?”
He just smiled at me. But not like, a real smile. More like how a hyena licks his teeth before digging into the tender flesh of its prey. The kind of thing I mistook for a smile back then, back when I was unlucky.
Unlucky or just dumb? I’d recently been chosen by a famous director to write a song for the end of his movie. That sounds pretty great. That’s how I ended up signing with this powerful music manager and landing in what I would soon discover to be hot, hot, shark infested water.
The unique and extreme situations I often found myself in caused me to be labeled as such: both lucky and unlucky. Perhaps it was as simple as my being born under a certain star, a perfect storm of circumstances.
Can one be self destructive while having an acute awareness of their luck? If you can really comprehend just how deeply your fortune runs, will you still make bad choices? I suppose I took it all for granted. Was it a broken decision maker or was I terribly misinformed? Because looking back now, it seems I just kept making one terrible decision after another. You can’t know what you don’t know.
A week later, I repeated this magical phrase—When preparation meets opportunity, luck occurs—to the one person I knew would understand it best. He was lucky. Always prepared for the abundant opportunities that flowed like golden rivers, landing in his open palms. How do we optimize good fortune, we wondered? By finding some wood, and knocking on it, of course. Which we did hilariously often on this particular day, while walking through the lower east side of Manhattan. We had just turned onto Canal street when a man ran frantically towards us, wild, red-rimmed eyes directed at me like missiles.
“It’s you! I’ve been looking for you! I have something for you!”
We paused uneasily as he extended a shaking palm, at the center of which lay a small, silver cross.
“It’s for you!” he shouted, staring into my soul. I could see all the holes in his mouth where teeth once lived and recoiled when he thrust the silver charm towards me once again, his arm a fang baring, lunging snake.
“No, no thank you,” I stammered, holding my hands up in protest.
“It belonged to my friend who DIED! HE DIED!”
“No. I don’t want it!” Shaking, I tried to push past him, but he remained firmly in my path.
“It belongs to you! You’re the chosen one! My friend who died says you need to have it!”
“No thank you!” I yelled, running away hand in hand with my pal, winding down through cluttered streets of Chinatown.
“Seems it wasn’t so lucky for he or his friend, was it?” I cried breathlessly, once we’d finally lost the toothless prophet. When my friend died suddenly, tragically a few years later, I considered the charm, and if I was meant to have taken it.
So many years after his passing, I wandered through the Grove in Los Angeles, on my way to the sticker store. A tiny woman rushed towards me much in the same fashion as the toothless wonder, arms outstretched so she could grab me by my hands and lead me to a nearby wooden table.
She knocked on it furiously, making my hands knock too, like I was her doll or puppet. There were tears in her large, brown, doe eyes. Staring up at me she repeated over and over again, “You’re beautiful, you’re lucky, and I am knocking on wood for you!”
“Excuse me?” Stunned and entranced by what was happening, I couldn’t really move. She wore a red bucket hat and bright purple sweater, looking like a four year old had dressed her. Her face had seen many lifetimes, yet was somehow ageless. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be afraid, as she said it again at a fever pitch. “I AM KNOCKING ON WOOD FOR YOU!”
