A Word In Edgewise: Luck? It’s All Around You

I was talking with a young person the other day, discussing differences in job hunting back in my day and today, touching on the role “luck” plays in any endeavor.

I’d tag my first “luck” to July 6, 1944, with Dad at the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Conn. The tent caught fire, and as the masses fled the flames, Dad threw me over his shoulder and ran out, alone, through the burning entrance. From my vantage point, I saw that end of the tent collapse, felt a wash of heat. We made it. 169 others didn’t. Luck, or Dad’s timely assessment?

Mother’s scrapbook records my discovery of comic books and my collection of 30 by November 1945. I was 4. I doted on Donald Duck, assuming, from the title, “Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories,” that Uncle Walt created the whole shebang.

Years passed, and one night, drinking our nightly brews at Cronin’s in Harvard Square, the topic turned to Ducks — specifically Donald, et al. Adults now, at least of legal drinking age, all agreed there had existed the Good Duck Artist, replaced, on occasion, by Others Far Inferior. We’d discerned this as kids, long before college and the learned exegesis of texts.

Intrigued, I pursued, wrote inquiries, learned the Good Artist’s name, and in 1965 began a correspondence with Carl Barks. Over time, I visited, wrote an article in Harvard Magazine, an introduction to a volume of Barks’s Disney oil paintings, a Barks feature for the Overstreet Comic Book Price, and the text for Barks’s watercolor book, “Animal Quackers.”

I insert this diversion because somewhere down south, a youngster was born in 1967 who, later, after reading the 1977 Overstreet Price Guide Barks piece, became a Barks collector and aficionado. Jump to 2023 when that youngster, now grown and having become an engineer, emailed, “Are you the E.B. Boatner?” The previous one having died in 1983, I allowed that I was. We became correspondents, now friends.

Last summer, when I had to have an operation, he wrote, “You will need this. I will drive it up (800 miles). And he did, arriving post-op to install an electric recliner, a huge boon then, and from which I currently write. Did luck manifest this generosity, or had I been working towards it since I was 4, devouring Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge adventures?

I lean towards reading as a factor. It saved my life at 10, before ever hearing “Carl Barks” uttered. Driving north for a Canadian fishing trip, Dad and I stopped at a waterside motel. I asked permission to swim, Dad nodded yes, I put on my suit, and was off. The water was different from our pond, and bore me away. (Well, of course. I’d jumped in the St. Lawrence River, as I learned later) I flailed about then remembered: my Boy Scout Manual warned (and I paraphrase) “Don’t try to swim across a tide, aim diagonally and you’ll reach shore. Further downstream, but you’ll make it.” When Dad asked later if I’d had a good swim, I said, “Yes.” That last I learned on my own. The Scouts never red-flagged parents.

Thomas Wolfe opined, “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin four thousand years ago in Crete the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” More direct was E.M. Forster’s “Only connect.” Like DNA chains, luck has long antecedents.

Mr. Rogers advised youngsters, “Look for the helpers.” I’ll add, “Look for what you can learn.” What can you salvage from a bad job/situation? If a good situation, who should you thank? It’s all added onto the chain; you’ve only to access it.