A few lucky rolls in the crap shoot of life

Good and bad things can happen to us by chance. Here are a few lucky rolls I've be thankful for lately.

• Getting my parents. We don't get to choose them. Mine provided a stable family life and support for my interests, talents, and unexpected changes through life. Love and stability matter.
• Being born before Pearl Harbor. Until 9/11, I thought those who could remember Pearl Harbor had a very different national experience from those born later. The knowledge that we can be hated enough to be attacked has consequences.
• Being a teenager at the birth of rock and roll in 1954 -- and living in LA with a large black community (hence black radio stations). 
• Coming of military age after Korea but before Vietnam. And facing a military draft, which I believe is important because without it, as now, many citizens easily space out military activities overseas. If you had a draft today, you'd also have a very active peace movement, believe me.  I had more luck. My personal journey was such that it made sense to "bide time" in the Army in 1959, and a military recruiter in Berkeley, to fill a quota, put me in the Army Security Agency, leading me down a path that found me working as a Russian Linguist in Germany at the height of the Cold War -- with colleagues older and more well read than I, who were forever handing me books. My Army experience included many times fielding the question, Have you read this? Not your typical Army career!
• Being in grad school in my 20s during the Vietnam era. Old enough to have significant prior experience to put the times in a different context from the mostly younger protesters.
• Ending up in Portland in the late 70s, a playwright writing plays about the people in small Oregon towns, just at a time when several theater artistic directors in town welcomed such material.
• In my 50s, in the VA hospital, kicking booze, I had the good fortune to be assigned a counselor who knew how to deal with someone like me, for whom AA would never work. Also being assigned to work in the medical library during a 9-month in-house program, which let me define my "higher power" as knowledge. Knowledge is power.

There are many other things that were not accidental, of course. But the changes above, to large or small degree, have an element of good fortune attached. Different rolls of the dice would have had different results.