If its raining or snowing or wet in any way, only one
newspaper in the daily delivery of the New York Times to my building gets wet.
Mine.
If a paper is damaged, ripped or wrinkled, it’s always mine.
Its because I live on the 15th floor of a 16
story building.
My question is why in all the years that pile of newspapers the
lobby has grown with new subscribers, why have the apartment owners on the
floor above me never chosen home delivery?
Is this a metaphor? Am I the person who will always draw the
short straw or inevitably choose the one rickety chair in a room full of
perfectly stable ones? Is it always my shoes that are making that annoying
squeaking noise? Why when everyone was talking in my high school classrooms,
did the teacher choose me to chastise?
Oh well, I guess by this stage of my life there is not much
I can do to change my karma. But I can choose just to wonder about it rather than
totally believe in it.
There are plenty of things to contradict this verdict.
Sometimes a parking spot magically appears just when I need it. One of my children
may call just to shoot the breeze. Or a dog may amble over to me unbidden in
the park just to say hello and get it's ears scratched.
I choose not to be too pessimistic because if I did I would
be like that Lil Abner character, Joe Btfsplk, who walked around with a dark cloud
over his head.
But I do know that if Joe’s cloud bursts into a thunderstorm
which newspaper it will rain on.
