When is bad luck not so bad?
Like my mom would say, it's always something
I believe it was Tolstoy who said “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and the same can be said for travel delays. But travel delay stories are frigging boring, so let me tell you about the Oblonsky family instead.” I won’t bother telling you about how I’m waiting on another delivery of misplaced luggage right now.
A too-long wait in Montreal airport on Friday put me in a state of pseudo-productivity, reading my digitized journals from 2017 and 2018, looking for some little nugget of an idea for the post you’re reading right now. But reading them was a huge downer. Maybe my bummed-outness was the result of sleep deprivation, which any mother of a toddler will tell you often looks an awful lot like sadness.
“It’s always something.” That’s one of my mom’s lines, usually followed by that noisy intake of air Newfoundlanders make when they agree with you. “Hhhyeah,” an expression of resignation to the relentlessness of bad luck. I dare say it’s a cultural quirk, born of the generational trauma of living with limited resources in a climate that’s downright adversarial.
If you know me well, you know I have a thing for beachknitting. It started out as a way to calm my nerves in intense social situations like a noisy pub or an overcrowded beach. The repetitive action is like a productive fidget, helping burn my excess nervous energy and diverting my overstimulated attention just enough to experience my surroundings without getting overwhelmed. A low-stakes problem to solve. More on this later.
Today, with a good night’s sleep, I find the 12-month stretch of mishaps and bad luck from April 2017 to April 2018 hilarious. A hospitalization, a cockroach infestation, a bank account hack, and three lost phones: one killed in a flash flood, one lost in a dumpster, one yoinked from before my very eyes at a sidewalk café. All these things happened while I was more than 6,000 kilometres from home. (Let me know if you’re curious about any of these bits of bad luck—I’m happy to entertain you with the details!)
In light of the pandemic and all the complications that came along circa 2020, I now remember 2017-18 with fondness. My housesitting and freelancing had begun a few years before as temporary solutions to my housing and employment needs. By the end of 2017, I’d stretched that solution out, season by season, into a way of living. I was beginning to believe this life of travel could be a sustainable option for the long term, infinitely more suited to my nature than living in one place.
At the end of 2017, I was taking care of a whip-smart Rottweiler-Weimeraner cross for a muddy Christmas season in Bradford-on-Avon. It was a busy time for my freelance work, and I would never decline a job. Meanwhile, this two-year-old giant pupper needed loads of stimulation and at least three hours of walking daily to prevent him from destroying his owners’ most prized possessions. And, believe me, he knew which possessions were prized. I’m not proud of it, but I was counting down the days to just after New Year’s, when I’d be shifting to a pet-free Airbnb in a sunnier climate.
December 30, 2017, I write in my journal: “Visit Lynette at Christmas 2007, as she’s playing carols at her piano there in that lovely living room on York Street. Tell her how much is going to change.” Five months into 2008, I would make the decision to quit my unhappy job and enroll full-time in university.
I continue in this 2017 journal entry: “My morbid brain now imagines a 2027 version of Lynette coming to visit me today. She tells me to savour every moment of now, even this demanding dog, because there’s another revolution coming and it isn’t gonna be fun.” Did my 2017 journal-writing hand have some awareness of COVID-19? Was I a prophet?
Nah. I knew I was just a worry-wart. “It’s diabolical, the spirit in me that says, all in one mouthful: you are blessed, and you’ll pay for it soon enough.” I felt too lucky. I knew, despite the bad luck and the needy dog, I was having too much fun. I hadn’t merited this grace, so there must be some hell to pay.
Is it just me, or does everyone have the sense that their current patch of bad luck is exceptional? I’ve been reading about how trauma affects the body, and I’m inclined to think our brains get activated during predicaments and assert that this problem is the worst. Whatever the situation is—sickness, lost phone, lost luggage—it demands that we drop everything and resolve the issue. And if we can’t solve it right now, then we grouse and gripe about it until the next problem asserts its primacy. Probably just me.
This one time, in Montenegro, I took a boat tour. The guy, who didn’t speak much English, confused the words for hour and day, and what I expected to be a one-hour adventure turned into a full-morning boat ride followed by an afternoon at a remote beach. The boat dropped us there with instructions to be back at this pier at 17:00 and sailed away.
I’m stranded, I thought. That’s where my brain went. I hadn’t gotten on that boat prepared for a full day. I had enough cash to rent an umbrella and lounger and get a little food. My phone was at half-charge. To put it another way, I had everything I needed, and I was on a gorgeous beach in the middle of nowhere.
By the way, before leaving us stranded in this little paradise, the boat had taken us inside an incredible turquoise sea cave. It stopped there long enough to let us have a quick swim in the luminescence. I had floated on my back and saw the stalactites poking down from the cave’s ceiling.
I spent my marooned afternoon on that beach, alternating between swimming and knitting. I was working on a pair of socks. When it was time to turn the heel, I couldn’t remember how. I used a whackload of my phone’s remaining battery charge to find a sock pattern that matched my current work in progress. I misread the directions and had to back up multiple times. When my phone screen went black, I put down the knitting and went back into the water.
That boat trip happened in the summer of 2018, a half-year after Rottweiler-Weimeraner Christmas. When I wrote that post about 2007 Lynette and 2027 Lynette, I had no idea I’d ride a boat in the Adriatic and swim in a sea cave and be left to fend for myself on a gorgeously remote Montenegrin beach.
Only in retrospect can I look back on all those spots of bother in 2017-18 and view them with an adjusted sense of scale. In any given moment, the knot I’m so focused on untangling is miniscule compared to the blue-green fullness of real life.
That evening, the boat picked us up at Zanjice as scheduled. On the ride back, I was startled by the horizon. Behind Herceg Novi towered a massive mountain range, invisible from within the town. From this far out on the water, it was awe-full, like an invisible giant suddenly revealing its fullness. It was humbling, like that underachiever in school who grows up to blow everyone’s minds. It was also just plain beautiful. I wished I could photograph it. I tried turning on my phone again. It worked. The screen had gone black only as a power-saving adaptation.
Luckily enough, I was able to capture a few shots of the approach to Herceg Novi. Luckily enough.
