My Good Luck Charm

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:55:00 -0400

I found it in the street when I was 11 or 12, somewhere along my newspaper route: a small, oval stone, perfectly smooth, perfectly black. At that age I was quick to confer mythological significance on found objects (yes, I was a Dungeons & Dragons player), and I imagined this object had special powers. I kept the stone in a box most of the time (marked with Elvish runes out of Tolkien, if you must know), in order not to squander its potency. But on special days, when I faced extraordinary challenges (a midterm exam, let's say), I would pocket the stone and invoke its magic.

I had that stone for decades. It was in my pocket when I spoke at my high school commencement; when the results were announced in my student government election at UCLA; when I proposed marriage; and when I came to UMBC for the first time to interview for a job. Whenever I succeeded, I attributed a part of my success to the stone. When I failed, I blamed only myself. In this way, I developed a sense of myself as a loser-but-for-luck. I didn't quite believe that the stone actually had special powers, but I fully embraced a self-image in which my deep flaws and failings were just barely prevented from undoing me by repeated strokes of luck.

And then, one night about eight years ago (which I remember because it was the night of a U.S. Presidential debate), the stone was gone. It had fallen from a pocket I didn't realize was torn, somewhere on the UMBC campus.

Then a remarkable thing happened: I continued succeeding and failing at more or less the same rate as before. But every success was my own, or shared with other human beings. I wouldn't have guessed that it would matter to me, or that in my 30s I still had something important to learn about my own responsibility for the good things in my life. But I've never been happier than I am right now, eight years distant from my good luck charm.

Do you have a good luck charm of your own--and is it playing the same role for you (for better and worse) that mine did for me? Also . . . um, has anyone spotted a perfectly smooth, perfectly black oval stone on campus?

--David Hoffman