The Bad Luck

Why "the" Bad Luck?

My husband is from a very large family of French-Canadian descent, a group of people who invariably use the article "the" in front of numerous different phrases. Of course, this isn't necessarily any different from the scads of people living here in rural Maine who frequently take trips to the WalMart just as other people go to the mall, but there are sometimes when it takes me by surprise.

A couple of weeks before my husband and I were to be married we bumped into his grandmother at the grocery store, who told us how glad she was we were happy just before taking me aside and assuring me what a good man I'd found. That I knew, and agreed readily. I wasn't prepared for her next statement though. In a conspiratorial whisper she added, "You know our family has the bad luck though."

Does the Bad Luck Exist?

Once I started thinking about it, I realized that it wasn't necessarily untrue. We did seem to have more than our share of bad luck that year. First our beater of a car died and we needed to find another one a week before our wedding, which, incidentally we were paying for ourselves, leaving no expendable income for a vehicle. Then, my job imploded (and me with it), so we were one income short. And it just went on from there.

Since then, things have righted themselves a bit, but I'd never experienced so many disasters at once. But my husband took it all in stride, saying it was par for the course for his family. Hmm...

The Bad Luck vs. Hard Luck

Is there such a thing as "the bad luck?" It's an interesting concept. Especially when you differentiate between bad luck and hard luck.

Hard luck is when life is continuously difficult and- here's the important part- you make no effort to try to change it. So, the job sucks, there's no money, the spouse leaves, but it's always someone else's fault. Not looking for a new job, a second job, putting in the work to make a marriage better isn't bad luck, it's hard luck. It's something that can be changed.

Now the bad luck is entirely different. The bad luck is when, despite your efforts to the contrary, bad things just keep coming. Take, for example, Kathleen Caronna. She's the woman who was not only hit by a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon in 1997, but whose apartment was also the one that Cory Lidle's airplane crashed into. There's a woman who has the bad luck. No way did she court those disasters.

Stories of The Bad Luck

All of this got me to thinking. There must be thousands of stories out there like that. Stories, if you will, of The Bad Luck. About a year ago, I even went so far as to reserve the domain name with the intent of setting up an interactive blogsite for such tales. The domain registration has since expired, but the idea still percolates. Anyone have any good stories?