Good Fortune

The day began routinely enough. There was a GROUPON offer for a restaurant deal in the West Village that I remembered to get. Unfortunately, by the time I logged on, there was a "Sold Out" banner across the offer and the words "Limited Quantity Available" written underneath. This was not a major loss, but it was annoying to acknowledge that all I had to do was press a few buttons several hours earlier and it would be like finding a $20 bill on the street.

This disappointment was a good warm-up for what came next. The telephone rang and it was my younger son calling on his cell phone from Michigan to report that he had inadvertently left his new laptop in the airport bus on his way back to college and was now in a cab racing across Michigan in an attempt to recover it. Since we had recently gone through a similar experience with my older son, who left his laptop in a taxi returning to Boston and failed to recover it, I was not optimistic about the outcome. The benefit of the call was that I stopped thinking about the prospective "loss" of $20 on the GROUPON dinner and could now concentrate on the loss of a computer costing well over $1000. As time went by and there was no word from Michigan, I started thinking about my good fortune earlier in the morning when my loss was only $20.

After waiting over an hour and imagining what else might go wrong, the phone rang again. My son reported that they had arrived at the bus stop in East Lansing, MI two minutes before the bus arrived and that the nice man who had been sitting next to him came out and handed him the computer with a big smile. The taxi mileage was more than half the distance from NYC to Albany, but at only $1 a mile and a total bill of $90 with tip, I considered this loss to be a gain ! The taxi driver said this occurs more often than you might realize. The bus driver felt bad for my son and let him ride back to Ann Arbor for free.

Soon enough all of the preceding events were put into sharp perspective when the phone rang again. This time it was my wife, calling from work to report that a friend had just sent a long email with the heart-breaking news that the friend's breast cancer had recurred and that another operation and round of chemotherapy would be required. I immediately realized how ridiculous I was to concern myself about a GROUPON, a 78 mile taxi ride, or even the loss of a new Apple laptop in the face of something like this. In passing, I also couldn't help thinking that even if my "losses" materialized, they were nothing compared to our friend's chemo injections at $4000 each and that she had to self-administer them, not to mention that she would be fighting for her life.

Now it is evening and all is quiet. There were no more phone calls and soon it would be time for dinner. On a net profit/loss basis, I am roughly in the same position as I started out this morning. However, my actual good fortune is boundless.