☘︎ Lucky Things ☘︎

There was a rock I used to carry in my pocket—white, rough-edged, flecked with schist. I found it in an expanse of newly spread gravel under the bushes in front of the nursing home on Henry Street. It stayed in my pocket from sixth to tenth grade. Longer maybe? Or less. Time was taffy back then—how far can one month pull as a twelve-year-old learns that death is everywhere and nothing stays the same?

            It was the eighties. There was cyanide in the Tylenol, razorblades in the Halloween candy, missing kids on the morning milk carton. There was AIDS, and the sudden absences of the laughing men from my grandmother’s dinner parties. My parents were going to a lot of funerals.

            Did I believe the stone had a power to stop all this? Stop car accidents and illness and choking deaths? Anaphylactic shock and plane crashes? Did I think without the rock in my pocket I would be less protected from cancer, from poison, from murder, from my mother dying on her way home on the subway?

            I worried about everything: infections, an accidentally swallowed olive pit, the hidden potential for the body to be its own worst enemy. I slathered every scratch with antibiotic ointment. I checked the seals on the ice cream containers, the aspirin bottles. You couldn’t joke with me about this; you couldn’t tell me that if I kept doing that then worse would happen. You’d send me right to the rock in my pocket, one side worn smooth by my thumb and the necessary amount of touches. Was it three? Seven? Nine?

            Perhaps you can imagine what it is like for a girl whose body is becoming something she can longer predict, or recognize. How the world that comfortably was is behind her now and the way forward is nothing but traps, the unknown, the unmapped. So what does she do?

            She finds a rock. She holds on to it until—finally, she doesn’t anymore. What happened to it? Did she throw it in the river? Leave it behind under a tree for someone else? Bury it in the woods by the house in the country? She cannot remember. Sometimes she thinks it will turn up, in a drawer, still there after all these years and moves.

            And did it work, that rock? Did it keep her safe?

            Does anything?