The Good Luck of Right Now(39)
And I tried to think of what those good things might be: maybe a sick baby girl in Zimbabwe would receive donated medicine just before she was about to slip into a fatal coma; maybe a hungry beggar in San Francisco would find a warm steak in a trash can behind a five-star restaurant and dine under a full moon; maybe a young woman in Tokyo would meet the love of her life when she jogged into the driver’s-side door of a slow-moving car because she was singing with her eyes closed and her future soul mate would be driving and feel so bad about the bizarre accident, he would ask her to have coffee; maybe an elementary school student in Paris would suddenly remember the mathematical formula he needed to pass a test, and therefore would avoid getting grounded for a bad grade; maybe a Russian woman in a Siberian prison would think of her kindly grandmother taking her sledding just before she was about to kill another prisoner by sticking a fork into a bulging neck vein and would have a change of heart; maybe a man in Argentina would find his lost car keys in the meadow where he was sunbathing and could therefore drive home in time to pick up his six-year-old son from soccer practice as a would-be kidnapper cruised the field for stray children; maybe a sun-sized asteroid headed for Earth would be pushed off course by an exploding star and would no longer end humankind seven thousand light-years from now . . .
I don’t remember if these were the exact examples I came up with when I was in my twenties, but you get the idea—and as I sat in bed thinking of the many good things that had to happen all over the world in order to even out and nullify the horrible bad things that had happened to Mom and me, I started to see why Mom believed in The Good Luck of Right Now. Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t.
And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?
What else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts?
And isn’t it true, statistically speaking—regardless of whether we believe in luck or not—that good and bad must happen simultaneously all over the world?
Babies are born at the exact moment as people die; people cheat on their spouses, climaxing in sin, just as brides and grooms gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes and say “I do”; people get hired while others get fired; a father takes his son to a ball game just as another man decides he will never return home to his son again and moves to another state without leaving a forwarding address; a man rescues a cat from certain suffocation, removing it from a plastic trash bag, just as another man halfway around the world tosses a sack of kittens into a river; a surgeon in Texas saves the life of a young boy who was hit by a car while a man in Africa kills a child soldier with a swarm of machine-gun bullets; a Chinese diplomat swims in the cool waters of a tropical sea while a Tibetan monk burns to death in political protest—all of these opposites will happen whether we believe in The Good Luck of Right Now or not.
But after our home had been raped, it was hard for me to believe and pretend happily like Mom—maybe because I have always been a skeptic, maybe because I am not as strong as she was, maybe because I am stupid, retarded, simple-minded, moronic.
The next day I felt very anxious, and so I went to Saint Gabriel’s and found Father McNamee in his office writing personalized birthday cards to every church member born in the upcoming months.
I asked him to promise that no one would ever break into our house again.
“You know your mother’s theory, right? The Good Luck of Right Now?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it’s true?”
“I tried to pretend I did last night.”
“And?”
“It helped. I admit it. For a few hours. But I still worry that—”
“Pray.”
“For what?” I asked. “That our house will never be broken into again?”
“No. What happens to things is not important. Pray that your heart will be able to endure whatever happens to you in the future—your heart must continue to believe that the events in this world are not the be-all and end-all but simply transient unimportant variables. Beyond the everyday ins and outs of our lives, there is a greater purpose—a reason. Perhaps we don’t yet see or understand the reason—maybe our human minds are incapable of understanding fully—yet it all leads us to something greater nonetheless.”
“What do you mean, Father?”
He laughed in this good way, licked and sealed an envelope, and said, “Wasn’t it nice seeing our flock rise to the occasion last night? They had other things to do, you know. But when they heard what happened to you, their hearts instructed them, and they immediately sprang into action and simply helped.”
“So?” I said, wondering how that could protect me from future home invaders.
“You wanted to sleep in a urine-soaked bed last night, did you?”
“No.”
“Well, those people made sure you didn’t.”
“I’m not sure I understand how—”
“That’s also The Good Luck of Right Now. That’s also part of your mother’s philosophy.”
“I don’t get how it will protect us from future vandals,” I said to Father.
“You’re missing the point!” Father McNamee said, smiling and chuckling—like I was a young boy, like he was about to tousle my hair, even though I was a grown man.