Gilty conscience


I don’t believe in God (except in foxholes), but I do believe in original sin. How else to explain the guilt that has burdened me my whole life. Any windfall triggers panic and a pull to pay it forward—not out of generosity but to duck the sense of having gotten more than my due. And even hard-earned income is fraught, since I don’t deserve it any more than people who earn less deserve less.

The upside of luckiness seems to come only if my luck is trivial. Having the means to live in comfort can make me miserable, but spotting a quarter on the sidewalk can make my day. And squeezing into a subway car just as the doors close—now that’s an occasion for unrepentant joy.

 But the luckiest kind of luck for me comes in the form of hardship averted. One of the happiest days in recent memory was last year when my brother and sister-in-law and I were in San Francisco to settle my mother’s affairs. My sister-in-law had dropped me and my brother at a Wells Fargo branch and driven off to park the car—and then misremembered where she’d left it. The three of us scoured Lombard Street for blocks and finally concluded that the car had been towed or stolen. Just as we were about to dial the SFPD, my sister-in-law spotted the car. How we’d missed it I do not know. But the three of us luxuriated in a sense of vast wealth and carefree well-being for the rest of the day.

 And a corollary is that a bit of bad luck sometimes results in relief that something feared has been survived. Like the time my wallet was stolen from my desk at work: Years later, I still recall the wonderful lightness of being unencumbered—of not worrying about my money and my credit cards, because I didn’t have any. As Janis Joplin sang, Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

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