I gasped when I opened the e-mail. Staring out at me was my buddy Michael, with deep gouges in his forehead, purple bruises around his eyes, a bandage across the bridge of his nose and a brace around his neck. The message:
“I fell off the top of the wood oven. I am seriously lucky I didn’t break my neck.”
I called to get the story. There’s this forno in Michael’s backyard that his wife Lea uses for making bread and pizza and such. He was cleaning the top of it. Stepping from stove to ladder he lost his footing and crash-landed on his deck.
As he lay there he tested his limbs. Arms? Check. Legs? Check. He got up, bleeding from everywhere, went inside and called Lea. He needed her home, right now.
She got him to the hospital and then the trauma team went to work, scanning, prodding, swabbing and bandaging. The doctors and nurses didn’t need to tell him how lucky he was. He knew: He could have been killed. Or paralyzed. Or shattered. Instead, he just looks and feels, as he put it, like he tried to kiss a runaway train. The photo was taken after they’d cleaned him up.
* * * * *
This is a could-be-worse story. They’re some of the most important stories we tell: They remind us to “look on the bright side,” to “count our blessings,” to find something to be grateful for even when we’re miserable.
Think of a fender bender. Our first reaction is intense chagrin: Having a car accident is so much more annoying than not having a car accident. Eventually, though, we appreciate all the things that could have happened but didn’t: No one died. No one was hurt. The car wasn’t totaled.
In parts of the world where people have more experience with things going seriously awry, this is cause not just for relief, but celebration.
In Italy once, my friend Richard borrowed his landlord’s shiny new riding mower, tried to mow on a steep slope, rolled the mower and crashed it into a tree. The shiny new mower now had its first scratch.
When Richard reported the mishap to his landlord, all the landlord wanted to know was if Richard was hurt. Assured that he was not, the landlord summoned the neighbors to a long table under the trees in his yard and broke out several bottles of wine. We raised our glasses. To Richard not getting crushed by the mower! We drank merrily. (Oddly, I heard from Richard this week for the first time in several years.)
And then there are the vicissitudes of sports. I am always reassured to see how quickly even diehard fans are able to shake off a heartbreaking loss. Win or lose, we tell ourselves, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning and we will have to roll out of bed and get on with our lives.
“There’s always next year,” as Manny Ramirez once said, to the horror of Red Sox Nation. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Indeed, if we make the apocalypse the standard we’ll never be terribly put out by reversals of fortune. At a certain point, of course, this kind of thinking can get pretty cloying, which is why there are as many could-be-worse jokes as there are could-be-worse stories. This one is typical:
A man goes to his doctor.
“Doc,” he says, “I’ve had a dreadful week. On Monday I lost my job.”
“Well, things could be worse,” replies the doctor without looking up.
“But that’s not all,” says his patient. “On Tuesday my house was repossessed by the bank.”
Again the doctor simply shrugs. “Things could be worse,” he replies.
“To cap it all,” says his patient, “the banker ran off with my wife.”
The doctor now looks up. “Well,” he says, “things could be worse.”
At this point his patient becomes very annoyed. “How can you say that?” he exclaims. How could it be worse?”
The doctor looks down at the paperwork on his desk. “It could be me,” he replies.
* * * * *
Here on my leafy street, autumn’s mad ballet is mostly over. Time to clear the rain gutters.
The job wouldn’t be so bad if all you had to do was lean an extension ladder against the house and climb up. The problem is that the gutters are long and a man’s reach is short, which means that once you’ve cleared as much leaf muck as you can to the left and to the right, you have to climb down, walk the ladder over a few feet and climb back up. Do that a few times and you become daredevil, reaching well beyond what is safe just so you can grab a few more handfuls of muck per ladder move.
This year, I decided I’m too old for ladder work. So I hired somebody. If I hadn’t, it could have been me who fell off the ladder and looks like he tried to kiss a runaway train.
“Mikey, old pal,” I can sympathetically and selfishly say, “it could have been a lot worse.”
