Better Lucky Than Good (part two)

Note: See Part One

My father likes to say “better lucky than good”. His family has good genes. They didn’t earn them. It just worked out like that. They are lucky. His parents were dirt poor folks from rural Alabama. Neither one got more than eight years worth of education. They were smart enough, however, to move away from the country and to Mobile. Mobile isn’t a step up from most places, but from Butler County, Alabama, it is by almost any measure. They were always poor, especially by today’s standards, but life in Mobile afforded them a degree of comfort and opportunity they’d never have known out in the woods.

Either Granddaddy or Grandmama must have been pretty damn smart. All three of their kids were successful and wiped the dust of Alabama from their shoes long ago. My father was the oldest child. He managed to parlay a flair for the written word and the ability and audacity to bullshit into a successful journalism career. He wasn’t pulitzer material, but he did manage to start two families, stick with the latter one, and spend roughly 50% more than he ever earned.

The youngest, a girl, married an ambitious Mobile boy and they blasted off for New England straight out of college. Their only child excelled at both business and information technology at the University of Georgia, formed his own company with a group of guys right out of college, and is seriously considering retirement. He’s in his early 30s. My aunt jettisoned her first husband, who was certainly successful, for a much younger multi-millionaire and now “summers” in France and New England when she’s not toughing it out in Vancouver, their primary residence.

The middle child was cursed with diabetes. He lived with it practically his entire life. Out of high school, where he didn’t excel, it cost him several jobs because of insulin shock incidents. As a result my grandparents somehow scraped up the money to send him to college where he blossomed, finishing second in his class, then first in his med school class. He had successful research and administrative careers at med schools in Mississippi and Texas before his drinking caught up with him. He was doing pretty good after his seventh trip through rehab but he slipped. They probably would have kept him on anyway, but when he had a confederate uniform tailored and started reporting for work in it, they had to let him go. In essence, his luck ran out.

Had my father and his siblings been less lucky, and thus less intelligent, they’d have probably lived their lives out right here in Mobile working for the city, the university, or maybe the ragged Mobile Press Register. They were also fortunate that their working lives coincided with better economic times for the country. As blessed as they were and are, whether they could start with essentially nothing in today’s climate and still thrive is highly suspect.

Better Lucky Than Good (part one)

It never fails to amaze me when otherwise sane people discount the importance of luck in life. “You make your own luck” and “the harder you work the luckier you get” are cliches most of us grow up hearing. They are over-simplifications, though, like lots of other truisms. Ironically, folks that profess to believe them are usually themselves the beneficiaries of good luck.

Good looks and high IQs are strictly accidental. With the exception of good health, however, nothing else comes close to being as important in terms of predicting success. All fertile adults are capable of producing beautiful and/or brilliant offspring, as well as hideous dimwitted freaks. Doing so, though, is strictly a matter of chance. The parents and the kids don’t earn it or in any other way deserve it. Most Americans don’t like to admit it, but people not born with physical beauty and/or powerful intellects are almost certainly destined to live lives of mediocrity, and that’s if they are lucky. (Exceptions would be those born with marketable abilities, such as musicianship or athleticism. Even more luck is then involved in making such talents pay.)

There are other factors involved. Dogged determination and vast stores of energy help in the quest for what most Americans call success. (That would be earned wealth.) Contrary to what beneficiaries of either might like to believe, they aren’t qualities subject to the will. It’s all in the genes, and even if the environment plays some part, one would have to be lucky enough to be the product of the right environment.

The moral is that if you were born to bright and beautiful parents who provided you a loving and stable environment to develop whatever gifts they passed on to you, thank your lucky stars. If your family is affluent, all the more so. The factors most important for success in our hyper-competitive society aren’t earned, they are inherited. People are born with or into the things necessary for success. It’s dumb luck.

Naked Tornado Drill

Once upon a time in the early ’90s I caught a “love” piece on a morning talk show. Two young women who’d penned a book were describing signs that a relationship was in trouble. They advised men that when their girlfriends no longer come to bed in the nude, things aren’t looking good. I almost certainly scoffed at the information. For some reason, though, I still remember the tidbit.

In the late ’90s I was living in Germantown, Tennessee. That’s where rich and wannabe-rich Memphians tend to live. (I was neither but that’s another series of posts.) It’s also where lots of tornadoes of the deadly variety seem to touch down. I lived there between ‘93 and ‘99 and in that time tornadoes killed people in Germantown on at least two occasions.

One night in the Spring of ‘98 the tornado sirens woke me from a sound sleep. Germantown’s tornado history and the fact that my room had several large windows inspired me to climb from bed and seek shelter in the hall. I remember feeling a flash of concern for my girlfriend and our tiny basset hound puppy.

I found the puppy in my girlfriend’s lap. She was seated on the floor in the hall, riding the storm out, such as it was. I remember being mildly amused that she’d chosen to save the puppy, but hadn’t bothered to wake me. A smarter man might have suspected, then and there, that something was wrong with “us”. She was even wearing a cotton nightie. I didn’t get it though, until some months later when she summarily ejected me and the by then hefty hound from her life. Live and learn.

Hank Williams and Uncle Homer

The summer of 1976 found me preparing to enter high school and the ninth grade. Actually, I wasn’t preparing for it. It was just inevitable. I was probably nervous but I really don’t remember.

About the time my Babe Ruth baseball season ended my paternal grandmother’s Aunt Marion died. I didn’t know Aunt Marion. I lived in Mobile and she, like most of my father’s people, lived in Butler County, Alabama. My father came down from Memphis to take my grandmother to the funeral and I ended up going along.

There’s only one way to describe Butler County, and that’s rural. I’d been through there a few times over my 14 years, but never enough to forge anything remotely resembling a relationship. I wouldn’t have recognized any of my relatives from up there had I passed them on the street. Still wouldn’t. Such is the world I live in.

Only a couple of things stand out from that visit over 30 years ago. After the funeral, we went to visit “Uncle Homer”. He was one of my recently-departed grandfather’s older brothers and the physical resemblance to Granddaddy was striking. His wife let us in and chatted with Dad and Grandmama for a time. The old man never so much as acknowledged our presence. “Uncle Homer” was engrossed in a professional wrestling match he was watching on a portable black and white television. He spit tobacco juice in a coffee can. Part of me thinks he was playing a fiddle, but I’m not certain about that. From time-to-time he would roar with laughter at the antics of the fake wrestlers. He never looked at me. It was surreal. It may also have been alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, or dementia, but I hadn’t been introduced to those yet.

Later we went over to visit one of Dad’s cousins. He had a modern house and a bunch of hotrods all over the yard. While Dad and Grandmama visited with the adults, I adjourned to the bedroom of one of the kids who was about my age. We were both interested in music and swapped a few licks on his acoustic guitar. Peter Frampton was all the rage that summer, but my cousin had never heard of him! He’d never heard of any of the bands I was into. It’s entirely possible he’d never heard of rock-n-roll. For him, Hank Williams was still the one and only, even though he’d been dead since 1953!

You’d have had to have been there I guess.

2006: Goodbye and Good Riddance

For the most part, 2006 sucked pretty badly for me. I won’t recount the lows here and now. Instead I’ll tell you a little about my New Year’s Eve. It was fairly representative of the year as a whole.

There was but one must-do-mission on my plate; pick up Mom from the airport. Seemed simple enough. Having picked up many people at many airports over many years, I learned long ago to call and check on the flight’s status prior to departing to meet the plane. Actually I checked Delta’s web site, which indicated Mom’s flight was right on time 40 minutes prior to its scheduled arrival.

Once at the pitiful, and I’m being kind, Mobile Regional Airport, I checked the electronic flight information screen and it too indicated that Mom’s plane was minutes away from landing. A few minutes later Mom’s flight data scrolled off the top of the screen. Mom’s plane, however, wouldn’t touch down for nearly an hour and a half. There was no corrected info on the flight information screen. There was no announcement over the public address system. Just lots of waiting and staring at other confused rednecks.

Finally, an hour and a half behind schedule, we departed the pathetic Mobile Regional Airport. We hadn’t traveled two miles when Mom informed me she had to “poop”. I asked if she wanted me to find a bathroom, or perhaps a tree, but she said she could make it home. Mercifully she was right about that.

Prior to leaving for the airport I’d planned on picking up Churches chicken for supper. Mom said she could make it, so I pulled into the drive-through and assumed the third place in line. From the car I noticed there was one customer at the counter inside. 20 minutes later we exited the parking lot. Mom was squirming pretty good by then.

Well, Churches cheated us out of our biscuits and peppers. After the long waits at the airport and the drive-through, not to mention Mom’s pending poop, we neglected to check our order until we got home. Apparently Churches and Delta use the same customer service consultants.

Later, between 8 pm and midnight, I heard at least 100 gunshots in the immediate vicinity of the house. It pales in comparison to what I experienced in the hood in Memphis back in the 90s. That total ran into the thousands, but most of them were fired right around midnight. Here in Mobile, it peaked around 10. Go figure, but don’t go outside.

For my yesterday to have been a truly accurate reflection of my 2006, I’d have needed to total the car, have been car-jacked, and/or been a victim in some sort of terrorist attack at the ridiculous Mobile Regional Airport. Anyway, that’s the day and year that was. Here’s hoping for a turnaround in 2007.

New Year’s Day Bowl Game Predictions

Today is the big day for college football fans. I know as little about college football as most other things, but that never stops me from flouting my ignorance. Here’s what almost certainly won’t happen, because I think it will.

• Outback Bowl: Tennessee 17 – Penn State 13
• Cotton Bowl: Auburn 24 – Nebraska 23
• Capital One Bowl: Arkansas 31 – Wisconsin 17
• Gator Bowl: West Virginia 38 – Georgia Tech 24
• Rose Bowl: USC 21 – Michigan 20
• Fiesta Bowl: Oklahoma 49 – Boise State 10

If I bust .500, I’ll be doing very well for me.

Signing On

Happy New Year and welcome to the latest manifestation of my madness blog. Topics will run the gamut and be more personal than at Age of BS. My primary goal has always been to survive with (not in) style and enjoy the ride. Unfortunately I’ve been in a slump for a (long) while. Maybe now that I’m older, fatter, and crazier I can mount some sort of comeback. It’s a long shot. Over time the tale will unfold here.

Stories from past lives are planned for future postings. Additionally I’ll chronicle my relationship with my redatives. My struggle for the legal tender may prove blog-worthy. Books, movies, and music interest me, sometimes more than others, and are apt to be posted on if and when the spirit moves me. Then there are my ongoing health challenges.

If you are morbidly curious and have a strong constitution, you may eventually find something amusing here. If you don’t, what the hell? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed. All that.