“Tim-berrrrr!” Jack yelled as the tree fell.
“That’s not exactly necessary, you know,” Phil observed. “We’re not in the north woods.”
Jack grinned. “True, but I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Well, you’ve done it. Now, let’s get to work cleaning all this up.”
The tree in question was a spruce tree in Jack’s back yard. It was dying, and Jack decided it was time for it to go. Phil had come over to lend a hand, and with the help of a chainsaw, the two of them had been able to take the tree down.
It was a hot summer day, and the two men were perspiring. When the job was done, Jack asked, “Got time for a cold beer?”
[spoiler]“Always do, when the job’s done,” Phil grinned.
“Coming up,” Jack said, disappearing into the house.
When he returned with two beers, Phil was hammering something into the tree stump. Drawing closer, he noticed that it was a quarter. “What’s that supposed to do?” he asked.
Phil looked up. “Bring luck. I heard about it when I was in the UK last year.” He accepted a beer from Jack. “I’m not sure why it’s supposed to bring luck. But the locals mentioned it and so I hammered a coin into a stump over there, and the last year was pretty good, business-wise. Figured it was time to renew.”
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. “I could use a little luck too,” he said. “Give me that hammer.”
Jack didn’t think about the coins in the tree stump too much after that. They were there, certainly, and he noticed them when he was out working in the yard; but otherwise, they weren’t on his mind. When he did think about them, he admitted that his luck hadn’t really changed at all.
Or had it? He wondered. One day, for example, he had been working in the yard. He was digging a hole, so he could plant a bush, and at one point, his shovel hit something. His first inclination was that it was a rock, and a good hard shove would dislodge it. But then, he looked a little closer. Brushing away loose dirt, he found it was a buried electrical line—and it he had not taken the time to investigate, he might have pushed the shovel through the line, cutting off power to somewhere at best, and electrocuting himself at worst.
Then there was the time he got in his car, as he did every morning, to go to work. He had actually seated himself in the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition before realizing he had left his cellphone inside the house. He wasn’t keen on wasting time to go back into the house to get it, but he did, returned to the car, and went on his way. Only there was a traffic problem on the expressway—from what he could see as he crawled past, a semi truck had gone out of control and crushed a car. The accident looked recent; emergency crews were not even on the scene. And he realized, if he had not taken time to return for his cellphone, that might have been his car—and him—under the truck.
Because those events made him curious, he decided to buy a lottery ticket. He never played the lottery, but if his luck had truly changed for the better, then a lottery ticket would tell him. And so, while on his lunch break one day, he went to the nearby newsstand and bought a lottery ticket.
As things would turn out, it didn’t win.
But while he was at the newsstand, he had run into Janice, an acquaintance whom he knew from seeing her in the elevators and common areas of his office building. She worked a few floors above his insurance company, in the head office of a bank. He nodded a hello when she saw him buying the ticket.
“Feeling lucky, Jack?” Janice smiled.
Jack chuckled. “Maybe I am. But you have to admit—this week’s prize is a good chunk of change.”
“That it is. What will you do if you win?”
“I hadn’t really thought about that,” Jack replied. “A new car? Travel? Retire?”
“I don’t think you’d like retirement,” Janice said. “You don’t strike me as the golfing and fishing type.”
“I’m not. Maybe I’ll become a rock star and record a few platinum albums.”
Janice laughed. “I’m not sure you’re the rock star type either.” She paused. “What do you really do again?”
“Insurance actuary.”
“So that means you study all kinds of demographic and other data, in order to determine risks, and set your premiums accordingly, right?”
“Well, there’s a little but more to it than that. For example—“
She cut him off. “Close enough though?”
Conceding the point, Jack smiled weakly. “Close enough.”
“Wonder if you’d be a good fit at my bank,” Janice mused. “We need a researcher-slash-analyst, and we haven’t been able to find just the right person. Maybe it’s time we stopped looking for bankers and started looking for people like, maybe, insurance actuaries.”
And a few days later, he had looked into the job at Janice’s bank. It was somewhat the same, but different enough to be interesting; and it paid more and had better benefits. So when it was offered to him, he took it.
He hadn’t see Janice much at the bank, but she worked in a different department on a different floor, so it was a nice surprise when she poked her head into his office one day.
“Hi, Jack. How’s the new job?” she asked.
“Janice! Great! Loving every minute of it.”
“Good to hear,” she said. “Listen, I wonder if I could ask a favour.”
“Sure,” Jack replied. Janice came in and closed the door.
“I don’t know how else to say it, so I’ll just say it. I need a date.”
Jack was speechless. Janice continued, a little nervously. “It’s one of those family things. A cousin’s wedding. I’ve received an invitation for me and a guest. And the last time one of these things happened and I went by myself, I had to put up with all my nosy and pushy relatives asking me when I’d be getting married, and whether I had met So-and-so, whom they thought would be perfect for me, and so on. If I take a date, then I don’t get all those questions and hopefully, they’ll leave me alone.”
“But why me?”
“Why not you? You’re pleasant, can make small talk, and your looks won’t make small children run screaming from the room.”
Jack smiled. “That’s a bizarre compliment, but I’ll take it.”
“So will you go with me?”
Jack paused. He and Janice had never made more than small talk when they did meet, but she seemed to be the type of person to whom he might be attracted. And Janice was attractive, there was no doubt about that. He smiled. “Okay, sure, I’ll go.”
“Great!” Janice enthused.
The wedding was the kind of wedding Jack liked: a brief, but serious, ceremony; followed by a lengthy, raucous reception. Most of Janice’s relatives had sized Jack up and given Janice approving looks, though a few had insisted on longer conversations. One such was Aunt June, an elderly widow. After introductions, Aunt June boldly asked, “So, Janice, when will you and Jack have a day like this one?”
“Oh, Aunt June, we’ve only been seeing each other a little while. It’s too early to think about that.”
“But you’re not getting any younger, Jannie,” Aunt June pointed out. “And if you want to have children…” She trailed away, knowing that Janice could fill in the blank.
“We’ll discuss it, Aunt June,” Jack interjected. “We’ve got a lot to talk about still, and we can put that on the agenda.”
Aunt June smiled. “See, Jannie? Your young gentleman is interested. I hope to hear good news soon.” She winked and wandered off in the direction of the dessert table.
“’Jannie’?” Jack asked, when she was out of earshot.
“A name I’ve never liked, but one that Aunt June and a few others insist on,” Janice replied. “My turn. What was that ‘we’ll talk about it’?”
“A way to quiet Aunt June for the moment. She hears an answer that to her is suitable, so she doesn’t press the issue; but we know it means nothing.”
Janice smiled. “You sure you’re a researcher? You’re doing a good job of amateur psychology.”
“No psychologist me,” Jack said. “Just a boring old researcher at a boring old bank.”
Janice laughed. “I don’t know about the ‘boring’ part.” She stepped back, and looked at Jack. “And I’m not so sure about the ‘old’ part, either. Still young enough to take a spin around the dance floor?”
“I guess I could, if paramedics, oxygen, and a defibrillator are standing by,” Jack deadpanned.
“Oh, stop it,” Janice laughed, taking his hand and pulling him towards the dance floor. “Let’s go.”
The wedding was the start of it. Janice, mostly undisturbed by nosy relatives, had had a great time; and in spite of being a complete stranger to everyone except Janice, so had Jack. It had been a long time since he had been to such a gathering; and even longer since he had been in the company of anybody like Janice. Who knew that the businesswoman with whom he made small talk in the elevator could be so much fun?
He took the plunge one day, and asked Janice out for a drink after work. To his delight, she accepted; and drinks that day had turned into dinner. It was there that they made plans for another evening out—she had theatre tickets—and so, a few weeks later, they had enjoyed a show, followed by a late supper. A daytrip to a quaint small town a couple of hours nearby was next, and they had spent a happy day having lunch in a Mom-and-Pop diner and poking around the shops on Main Street. Jack was enjoying getting to know Janice outside the office, and was discovering that buried within the corporate businesswoman in severe suits was a fun young lady who looked great in a pair of blue jeans.
Some time later, Jack had invited Janice over to his house for dinner. Dinner at each other’s places was something they had done a few times before, but this day was a pleasant spring day, and for the first time, Jack and Janice were having pre-dinner cocktails in Jack’s back yard. It was too early for plants to come up, but Janice was looking around anyway, having fun guessing at what might come up where. Eventually, she was close enough to the tree stump to take a good look at it.
“Jack, what’s this?” she asked. “A couple of coins hammered into a tree stump?”
“Supposed to be for luck,” Jack replied. “My buddy Phil, who helped me take down the tree last year, said it was supposed to be lucky to hammer a coin into a tree stump.”
“Was it?”
“Well, over the past year, I nearly electrocuted myself, I was late for work, and I didn’t win the lottery. But I also wasn’t in a car accident, I got a new job that I like, and I met you.”
Janice smiled. “I think I understand.” She paused. “Got a coin and a hammer?”
Jack looked puzzled. “You need some luck?”
“No,” Janice smiled. “But Aunt June does. Remember she wants to hear some good news coming out of something we said we’d talk about? Maybe we can send a bit of luck her way.”
Jack laughed. “Maybe we could, at that,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a coin.
[/spoiler]