First Gloves: Bob Friend

Luck is important. You might call it good fortune, or karma, or simple random variation, or something else, but it’s pretty much inarguable that it plays a role in our lives. Sometimes that helps us. For instance, we avoid a terrible accident by a last-minute decision to take a different route than usual to the store, or a stranger finds our wallet and returns it to us intact instead of walking off with all of our stuff.

But often it doesn’t help us. Our different route to the store causes us to be the one car on that road to drive over a nail, or we drop a can of soda in such a way that it explodes instead of merely dents. Then we stand there, staring at our flat tire or watching the soda drip down the wall, and mutter something like “Of all the luck,” perhaps with our favorite expletive included for emphasis.

I got to thinking about luck because someone I don’t know named Jim DeMarco decided to reply to a post I made on Twitter a couple of months ago about the baseball glove he had as a kid.