So, I must have been six years old, because the event happened in my first grade classroom.
Our teacher, Ms. Dial, had brought her pet king snake to school. Maybe the snake liked being around children? I can’t imagine a snake liking children, but anything is possible.
At any rate, the snake somehow got out of its glass case, and was crawling across the floor, eliciting screams of childish terror from my classmates.
I had been studying reptiles in my free time — mostly, dinosaurs, but also ordinary, everyday reptiles — and I knew a couple of things about king snakes.
1. The bite of a king snake is non-poisonous.
2. If you are going to pick up a snake that’s trying to escape, you should grab it right behind the head so it can’t turn and bite you.
Armed with these two snippets of reptilian knowledge, I managed to grab the snake right behind its head.
Except, never having handled a snake previously, I misjudged what “right behind its head” actually meant. The snake turned and bit me on the hand.
I hardly felt the bite, but it left little bloody pinpricks.
I deposited the snake back in its glass case, and Ms. Dial treated my minor injury with a Band-aid.
Was I lucky? Or unlucky?
Philosophers have been arguing for centuries about the idea of “luck”. Does it exist? Is it a figment of our imaginations? Can it be cultivated, or called forth through prayer and burnt offerings?
A great American leader, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote — back when America was great and had great leaders — “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
We don’t know exactly what he meant by this. He could have been claiming that there is really no such thing as “good luck” and what appears to be good luck is merely the natural result of hard work. But he could have meant: “If you are diligent about playing the Lottery, you will eventually have good luck as a reward for your diligence.”
We also don’t know why Franklin thought diligence is the “mother” of good luck. Why not the “father” of good luck? Franklin spent a lot of time hanging around with the Founding Fathers, and not nearly as much time around mothers of any kind. But for some reason, Franklin thought mothers should get the credit for good luck.
The further implication is that there are at least two kinds of luck. “Good luck” and “bad luck”. Franklin never wrote about bad luck, so we don’t know who is the “mother” or “father” of bad luck.
Like the rest of the Founding Fathers, Franklin likely would have been hanged as a traitor, if the British had won the Revolutionary War. So the fact that John André, a Major in the British army, was captured on the Albany Post Road by three Americans, could be seen as good luck.
Major André was bearing a letter from Benedict Arnold, to the British command, offering to turn over control of the fort at West Point to the British. Possession of West Point would have given the British effective control of the entire Hudson River waterway, and might have dealt a death-blow to the Patriot cause.
When André met the three men on the Albany Post Road, one of the men was wearing a second-hand Hessian soldier’s uniform, which caused André to believe the men were loyal to the British. Big mistake. When he revealed his mission and sought their help, they arrested him.
The letter never reached the British command, and Major André was hanged, instead of Ben Franklin. So Major John André’s bad luck was, in a sense, Ben Franklin’s good luck.
I wonder if that’s how luck works? Maybe the whole thing is a balancing act… and when someone has good luck, someone else, somewhere, has an equal amount of bad luck.
Sometimes, however, good luck and bad luck go along hand in hand, like Jack and Jill going up the hill.
Take, for example, the following true story. In 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on business in Hiroshima, when the American B-29 christened Enola Gay dropped a nuclear bomb. He survived the blast, and hurried back to his hometown of Nagasaki — just in time to get bombed in the second-ever nuclear attack. Which he also survived.
He lived until he was 93.
Was Mr. Yamaguchi unlucky because he was present for not only one, but both, nuclear bombs? Or was he lucky because he survived both attacks?
We don’t know, because no one asked him.
Which brings us to Albert Einstein. Einstein had some crazy ideas about physics, most of which turned out to be surprisingly accurate. But he was frustrated by the mathematics of quantum theory which suggested that, within the realm of subatomic particles, everything was a toss of the dice. He famously wrote to fellow physicist Max Born in 1926:
The [quantum] theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.
The “Old One” being, God. As in, God the Father. Unlike Ben Franklin, Einstein thought the Father was in charge.
By 1945, however, Einstein had apparently changed his tune about God playing dice. In a letter to fellow physicist Paul Epstein, he wrote: “God tirelessly plays dice under laws which He has Himself prescribed.”
(I can’t verify this quote, because the letter was written in German.)
Einstein didn’t clarify what dice game God was playing tirelessly. Or if He is typically lucky.
So, to get back to the king snake escape in Ms. Dial’s first grade classroom. It wasn’t “luck” that the snake was non-poisonous, because king snakes are never poisonous. But it was unlucky that I grabbed the snake in the wrong spot, and ended up getting bit.
Still, it was lucky that Ms. Dial had a Band-aid handy. And also, that I won the admiration of my first-grade heart-throb, Susie.