My Lucky Day

I didn't bring in the daily paper this morning. There it was in the driveway but instead of picking it up before I left the house for my day, I ran over it.
I parked in the lot of a large chain sort of health food organic type store. When I came out with my purchases, someone had let loose their shopping cart and it had run into the side of my Jeep. I wheeled the cart to the boldly signed cart place then returned to look at my Jeep. A few more scratches had been added to its door and its story.
"I'm so lucky," I thought, "to have a car years and miles beyond its first scratch."
A car with over two hundred thousand miles to its credit is a wonder to behold and to own.
My outing continued to a popular area of town where none of the stores in which I had previously shopped existed. They were gone -- replaced by stores in whose inventories I had no interest.
"What a fine opportunity to avoid unnecessary purchases," I thought and felt good about the money I had saved.
In a bookstore, I noticed a calendar. It was an amazing calendar. You may recall my this time of year fixation with calendars. I was about to buy it when I looked at it more closely. It was for the year 2008. I put it back on the shelf and thought how incredibly lucky that I took the time to check out the year of that almost perfect calendar. Really, I've already got enough 2009 calendars and yet I was so close to buying another.
My errands run, only what I needed purchased, I returned home and again ran over the newspaper still in my driveway. Before I closed the garage door, I picked up the newspaper.
In the plastic bag with the paper was a sample box of granola. Of course, because I had twice run over it, the sample was in no shape to eat.
Again, I considered myself lucky. You see, several years ago I read a book in which a plague was spread by food samples delivered either in newspapers or through the mail. Since reading that book I have avoided all such samples. However, today as I drove into my garage I was thinking how great a bowl of granola would taste right about then.
Because I had twice run over the newspaper and its free sample thus rendering it inedible, I doubtless avoided becoming both a victim and a carrier of perhaps the deadliest plague ever.
Today was not only my lucky day, it was yours, too.