Bird Poop on my Shoulder Makes Me Happy





My Beautiful Wife Reminding Me Bird Poop is "Lucky"

We bid a fond farewell to Forsyth, Georgia on the third morning of our recent trip and continued south on I-75.  Twenty miles down the road we got on I-16, a short 170 mile stretch of Interstate dedicated to carrying traffic from Macon to Savannah.   It was a Sunday morning, traffic was light, and the sun was shining brightly.  We settled in for a relaxing drive to the sea. I entertained myself by watching the number on our car’s outside temperature gauge steadily increase as we rolled south.  Over coffee this morning a headline caught my attention:  4 DEAD IN FIERY HIGHWAY CRASH.  That crash, involving 27 vehicles, was on that same I-16, a seemingly benign stretch of Interstate if ever I saw one.

 

We arrived without incident at the Marriott Surfwatch on Hilton Head Island, S.C.  Marriott’s are normally not in our lodging price range.   Luckily, we were the recipients of some foreign aid.   Joe and Terry, our Australian cousins and frequent travel companions, transferred a couple of bonus timeshare weeks they were unable to use to us.  Only catch – they had to be used in January.  It was Joe and Terry my wife and I were traveling with last fall when I got the call my mom had died and our trip came to an abrupt end.  That brings me to an amazing coincidence:

 

While we were on our just-completed roadtrip, Joe and Terry were in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  While there, Terry was making some arrangements for a future trip and spoke with a representative of Booking.com, an Internet travel website. During the course of the conversation, Terry asked the representative where he was located.  “Springfield, Mo.” he replied.  “Oh?”, said Terry (who had spent a week in Branson with us last October), “do you know Doug Reece?”  “Yeah, he’s my cousin” said Johnny Brown, the Booking.com rep.  I’m not sure what the odds are for a person calling from Malaysia to call up an Internet travel company and get a representative that not only knows me, but will actually admit they are related to me.  It probably makes winning the Powerball lottery look like a coin flip by comparison.

 

Another instance of "what are the odds" events occurred later that week.  A seagull attempted to deposit a another layer of fudge-like substance on the hot fudge sundae I was enjoying.  It missed and hit my shoulder instead.   My wife was quick to remind me that being pooped on by a bird is SUPPOSED to be good luck, though the only good luck I could think of at the time was that it hit my shoulder instead of my ice cream.  The incident did reinforce the traditional Missouri wisdom about being grateful that cows can’t fly.

 

On second thought, I think I must be a lucky man for two reasons:

1.      Sometimes “good luck” is “the absence of bad luck”.  I didn’t win the lottery but I didn’t get in a 27 car pile-up on I-16 either.

 

2.     Why else would my wife so frequently remind me  “You don’t know how lucky you are!”