You Lucky

This was back in the eighties.  I was living in the basement of a house rented by my friend Rica... throw rugs scattered on the cement floor, books in boxes, the TV perched on a milk crate.  One morning, half awake snuggled in my futon on the floor, I heard an upstairs toilet flush.  Presently an offensive smell assaulted my nose and water began to rise from the drain in the floor... not just water... sewage.  I called to Rica as I pulled rugs away from the edges of the effluent which crept rapidly like a tide on a flood plain.  Frantically we dragged boxes away from the flow, threw the futon over a chair, lifted clothes onto the stairs.  By the time the level reached a stasis there was a fetid pond some ten feet across and three inches deep.  I sat at the top of the stairs holding my nose, and wept.

The plumbers arrived in thick pants and rubber boots.  They carried long poles with flat disks on the end.  One plumber attacked the sewer on the street while the other waded into my basement swamp, pulled the drain cover, yelled to his partner, and  commenced to pound his disk-pole into the drain with the passion of a boy in a mud puddle, making waves and spraying the room with brownish droplets and little sludge balls.  I ran down and pulled what stuff I could as far from the advancing swell as possible. 

Eventually there was a yell from the plumber on the street, and the evil fluid sank back into the hole from which it came. 

As I looked gloomily around my ravaged room the way a despondent general might survey the stinking aftermath of a battle won at great cost, the plumber ... and here’s the point of the story ... the plumber said, “You lucky.” 

I’m lucky? 

“You lucky.  If it hadn’t come unplugged we’d have had to dig a big hole in your front yard.  Very expensive.  You lucky.”

That was some twenty years ago.  Every once in a while I run into Rica, we look at each other and say, “You lucky.”  We remember that disaster, and the day that followed, in rubber gloves and boots, mopping, sponging, filling garbage bags, looking at each other and saying, “You lucky.”  You know  what.  We didn’t feel lucky.  We felt... well... we felt like the stuff we were cleaning up.

On that day I vowed never to rob someone of their well-earned misery, never to tell someone with a cast on their arm they were lucky they didn’t break their neck. ... never to tell someone groaning and sweating with the flu it could be pneumonia... never to tell someone who opens the fridge and all there is is a week-old Hawaiian Pizza that people are starving in China.  Never to tell someone whose house burned down to look on the bright side.