lucky

You know that old joke about the three legged dog with one eye and one ear that answers to "Lucky"? If there's a human equivalent of that dog, I sat next to him on a flight to New York for a reading a couple years ago. He had an endless supply of tragic stories that he unrolled like a carpet, and as a writer, of course, I wanted to hear every one of them. But as the guy stuck next to him on a plane for an hour, I didn’t want to hear any of them.

One such story involved the time he walked in on his best friend, who was about to kill himself. “I’m not good with words,” Lucky said, “and I didn’t think I could talk him out of it."

"So what did you do?"

"I tackled him.”

"How'd that work out for you?"

“Not well,” Lucky said. “I got shot.” Then he looked me in the eyes and said, “Sometimes you just have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough.”

He paused. “So. What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said, somewhat anticlimactically.

“Oh, cool, I love horses.”

“No, no, a writer. I tell stories.”

“Awesome. I have a ton of stories. How do you get to do something like that?”

I told him there was no qualifying exam, no board certification. You just did it. In fact, I said, you just have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough.

“Yeah,” Lucky said, lowering his seatback to the reclining position. “But if you screw up, no one gets shot in the ass.”