Some folks think I am lucky. They always suggest I should head out and buy a lottery ticket. I sorta just shake my head, smile and instead think of old Mr. Magoo, the cartoon curmudgeon, blindly walking forward and missing the falling brick, missing the fast paced car and always landing on his feet after walking over a cliff. My luck falls in the category of what could have happened and didn’t but you never knew. So that’s how I like to think about luck. And I am reminded of luck, regularly. You see, I find four-leaf clovers. Probably I’ve found close to 300 in the past three years!
Here’s my trick, just glance down and you’ll see one, don’t try standing in a patch of clover. It helps to have your golden retriever by your side sniffing for a place to do his business. Maybe he’s my lucky charm.
Really it has nothing to do with luck, it is just my little belief in something a bit more meaningful, a bit of hocus-pocus, and a bit of the spiritual connections we want to believe in and heck, just believing things are not always coincidental.
I found a few four-leaf clovers over the years, and when so, I would show my Mom and she would always shake her head and say, “I’ve never found one, but my mother could, she’d look down to the ground and spot one in a second.” Years later, I was out on the lawn with my Mom and looked down and spotted one, and she said: “Just like my Mother. I’ve never found one.”
My mother’s mother died before I was born. There a family tale that after my grandmother died in the spring of 1960 my uncle gave my mom a prescription for sedatives to help her sleep. I came nine months later. And much later I started finding four-leaf clovers.
Just like stopping to smell the roses, sometimes you need to glance down and look, and I was doing quite a bit of that in early Spring of 2011, my business had failed, my financial position was destroyed and I had time to walk. Walked a lot with my dog. Someone shared with me later, that my posture was pretty bad in 2011, but being slumped over allowed me to glance down at the ground while my dog sniffed. And suddenly, though, I started finding four-leaf clovers again, and bringing them home. At first I pressed them in books, eventually just taping them to the back of old business cards. One day I found a great big one and taped it onto one of my personalized notecards and stuck it in the book I was reading.
Later that month, with book in hand, I got on a plane and headed east to visit my parents, quite aware of my 87-year-old Mom’s ailing health. We spent most days that week, talking and visiting in her kitchen; where in her final years she liked to “hold court” as friends and neighbors, her physical therapist/trainer and eventually nursing aides came to see her. It was a gentle week of conversations with my Mom, I was beat up by the loss of my business and she did her best to listen, and encourage me and promised things would turn around and I got to share with her about some wonderful lessons I thought I had learned and she continued to try reassuring me, telling me I had great things yet to accomplish. At some point, there in her kitchen, my bookmark with the rather large four-leaf clover fell out of my book onto her lap.
She held it up, “I’ve never found one, but my mother could, she’d look down to the ground and spot one in a second,” she said. And knowing the many I had back in Seattle, I encouraged her to keep it, and use it as a bookmark, knowing though she wasn’t doing much reading anymore.
A few days later, when I was preparing to return to the west coast, Mom said, she was a bit tired for the ride to the airport and saying goodbye in her kitchen would be easier. The four-leaf clover on my personal stationary, rested on her own book, on the kitchen table, beside her. We looked deeply into each others eyes and we both smiled, kissed and hugged one another and we said “I Love You!”
And I walked out of the kitchen and left my mother.
When you live 3,000 miles from home, goodbyes can be awfully emotional. As my Dad and I rode down the hill heading to the airport, I realized, I had experienced the simplest farewell possible, I somehow understood what had just occurred and I realized I was smiling knowing that a significant force in my life was fading away and that would be the last time we hugged. I knew somewhere deeply in my soul, that I was not going to ever see my Mom vibrantly alive again, but I felt myself smiling and loved.
She collapsed three days later and although lived another four weeks in the hospital, mostly unconscious, when I finally returned home in her final hours, I only saw a bright quick twinkle in her eyes when she heard the tone of my voice. Later, arriving at my parents' house, I walked into her bedroom, our shared four-leaf clover bookmark was on her dressing table against the mirror. She died the next day.
The days before my mother’s funeral were busy and I spent a lot of time on my phone outside talking to consoling friends back on the west coast. Phone reception was better outside, and it was a bit cooler in the shade of the west hill behind their home overlooking Seneca Lake. I talked, paced and found myself looking. And I would find nothing.
You don’t find four-leaf clovers, they find you.
My sister, brother-in-law and I helped my Dad through those emotional days as family, friends and neighbors gathered; we rallied and straighten their home, did yard work, planned the funeral, cried and laughed and shared memories as families do during these times. Mom’s interment was to be at the local cemetery, less then a mile from my parents’ home. The cemetery was small and Mom and Dad had decided 20 year earlier to be buried there among the vineyard and Mennonite farms of New York’s Finger Lakes.
Plans seemed to be in order, and all going smoothly, until after the visiting hours at the Funeral Home on Thursday night. My Dad then decided he was ready to drive by to check out the cemetery and the plot selected years ago. So my sister, brother-in-law and other extended family and close friends headed back to my parent’s home where a lovely buffet was waiting.
Dad and I however took the back road to the cemetery, and upon arriving; nothing was as my father remembered from their careful planning 20 years ago. And although he had vigilantly attended many burials of childhood friends and neighbors in that very cemetery, the changes in the landscape that had occurred, had gone un-noticed. The raspberry bushes had been removed and the adjacent wooded acre cleared and leveled and suddenly my Dad was shocked that the cozy corner where he thought his beloved wife of 59 years and he would rest for eternity appeared to be an empty un-shaded field. He was devastated and confused. And convinced someone had marked the wrong plot for the early morning backhoe dig.
“I have been to the cemetery, and it is not right and I will not bury Catherine tomorrow unless we can figure this out.” He announced upon entering his home filled with family and friends. My sister, with a drink in her hand, walked over in my direction, rolled her eyes till they focused directly on mine and said, “you’ve been on the west coast most of the time, this one is all yours.” And I said “ok” and we hugged.
So Dad and I searched some files and found some papers and called some neighbors who were on the cemetery board. And it was agreed, Dad and I and two men would walk the cemetery at 8 am, with the funeral at 10 am and the internment immediately after. After breakfast, I went off dressed on the top in my Paul Smith suit for my mother's funeral, and in gym shorts and running shoes to walk the grassy, dew covered grass of the cemetery with my Dad just in case we did not have enough time and needed to go straight to the church. The rest of my "funeral clothes" I put in the car.
It all turned into a very easy fix; there were other available multiple plots nearby, we looked at two options, Dad focused on one in particular near a nice oak tree. He was happy and there was enough room for him and his children as originally Mom and he had planned, and he asked me whether I thought Mom would approve.
I looked at the tree and the view of Seneca Lake beyond the vineyards; I turned around and momentarily glanced down. Stunned, I caught my breath, for out of the corner of my eye as so often before… there two were and I knew…
“This is a good place, Mom would like this tree.”
And I leaned over and picked not one, but two four-leaf clovers.
So now on morning walks with my ten year old gentle golden retriever, who frequently stops to sniff, I often look down or catch a notion out of the corner of my eye, to make a quick glance towards the ground. And just as I have described, four-leaf clovers find me and I'm always startled and elated. It is not really about being lucky. Pure coincidence, this happens week after week? Some days, I just sorta know to look, sometimes as I walk I'm thinking about a challenge or issue and then as if someone is calling my name. I'll see one. It is really quite odd and really a little magical, somedays I just know they are out there.
I bend down, feel the warmth a smile brings across my face, feel a whole lot of love and know my Mom is there walking with us and I quietly and simply say:
“Good Morning, Mom.”
...and I think, lucky me!
