Searching for My Pony

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I've been thinking a lot about luck lately, and one of the things I've been thinking about has been the semantic nitpicking that goes on in one of my circles. This is the circle that spends way too much time jawing about whether to use the term "luck" at all. To say one is lucky or unlucky discounts divine influence in our lives, this group avers with the vehemence that I, personally, reserve for my support of the Oxford comma. The proper term for this kind of unforeseen occurrence is "blessing," they say, and the blessing is either obvious or deferred.

If this is the case, I'm having quite the run of deferred blessings.

There was, of course, the change in my job status that I'm beginning to enjoy immensely, as I sit here in my home office in a T-shirt, comfy capris, and Birkenstocks.

Then there was the root canal and my dentist saying  "uh-oh," and the revised root canal, and my mouth's first crown. And guess what? It came out just fine (aside from the untimely hit to our bank account) and I've now discovered that root canals aren't the horrible ordeals they apparently were before improved dental techniques.

Last Friday there was the computer tech guy saying "uh-oh" as he tried to install the printer driver on my desktop. He texted me about the problem, and ended with "Don't worry, though, your data is most likely recoverable." Although this did not fill me with confidence, the latest word from the tech ninjas was positive, and this crash might even result in a better, faster computer.

Yesterday morning I had occasion to think about the old story about the father who decided to teach his twin sons a lesson concerning the futility of high expectations by giving them a pile of horsepoop for Christmas.

One son was angry. "I've been good all year and all I got was a pile of horsepoop? This is the worst Christmas ever," he told his dad.

The other son, to the surprise of his father, grabbed a shovel and began to dig into the pile. "With all this horsepoop, there's  got to be a pony  in there somewhere," he yelled gleefully.

This story came to mind as I sat on a large rock next to Pearl, my 2003 Ford Escape. Pearl had just been rear-ended by the sobbing young driver sitting next to me who had taken her eyes off the road for just a second and didn't see me slowed down for a left-turning car. She was fine, I was fine, but her car and Pearl were not fine.

A little later today we'll take Pearl in to find out the full extent of the damage. I'm hoping the guy doing  the evaluation will say "What? Your seat-belts aren't retracting properly? Why don't we just fix that while we're in there?"

I'm determined to see what kind of deferred blessing is waiting, because at this point it's not obvious and I know there's a pony in there somewhere.