Today, with one of my writing groups, the prompt offered was simply, “Lucky?”
The channel waters rose in slow swells, the heavy ferry lifting and settling as it slid into place. Once I’d shared my proposed itinerary with the elderly gentleman who also waited on the Folkestone dock, he remarked, “You young people are so lucky.”
“I’m not lucky,” I said. “I worked really hard to earn the money for this trip.” Beside me rested my small, meticulously packed suitcase with bundles of maps and language dictionaries. I’d worked two jobs for two and a half years, and I was ready to discover the world. I’d planned my trajectory through North Africa and Egypt, with the possibility of Australia and New Zealand. On my way now from England to France, I would travel on to Holland before setting out to more exotic lands.
“Oh no,” the white-haired gentleman said, his face so kind. “That’s not at all what I meant.” He was tall and elegant that October morning in the dull English sun. “When I was young there was no possibility of such travel. That sort of freedom was unimaginable.”
What did I know? I had just turned twenty-four and thought I knew things. Before travelling and living in Europe for six months two years previous, I’d lived for a year in an isolated cabin in the mountains. I had experience. I’d lived. I hadn’t considered luck factoring into the equation. I controlled my destiny, arrogantly dismissing the notion that we were all children of fortune and circumstance. Because I made my own choices, forged my own path.
But looking out over the Dover Strait waiting for the ferry to take me to Calais, I began to see what I hadn’t seen. I didn’t ask that dignified, gentle man then about the war. The weight of moments like that doesn’t fully register until years later.
It was 1978. That still-handsome man had very likely lived through two world wars.
I suppose that through a certain lens, he would be considered lucky. Lucky to be free and waiting calmly on that dock for the ferry to take him to France. He may have even considered himself lucky for the friendly conversation with a naïve young Canadian woman who happily accepted his invitation to join him for lunch.