Taking a Swipe

           When you think about it, what’s really surprising is not how many things go wrong every day, but how many things go right. I wonder if from time to time we need to marvel at how well the world turns more than we complain about how many times it gets stuck during a rotation. Forget jobs, forget relationships, forget money: traffic lights work most of the time, and that’s a good thing.
            What’s more, the lines on the road and the rules of the road seem to work more times than they don’t. After all, there are thousands of cars making their way up, down and across all the streets, avenues, boulevards and interstates in the nation, at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour. Yet most of us get to where we want to go, unscathed. I think about that every time I drive to Union Station in New Haven, on the first leg of my commute to Stamford. If I didn’t have to pay to park there, I’d find very little to complain about.
            It was on my way to the station the other morning when I thought about a typical work day, and all the other things that go right, most of the time.
            The traffic lights and the white and yellow lines on the road are one thing; the car itself is another. It has more moving parts that depend on one another than we can even imagine, grinding, pumping, turning... There’s no good reason it should work day after day. Yet it got me to the station on time. Then I took a look at the train. It has these electronic arms on its roof that extend up and gently touch a wire stretched taut from New Haven all the way down to Stamford. That wire has to be perfectly straight and rigid, even under bridges, tunnels, through neighborhoods, over rivers and streams, through howling wind and blinding snow and torrential rain and destructive hail. And it is. And it works. And it got me to Stamford. If it weren’t for the high round-trip fare, I’d be able to sleep on the train without having bad dreams.
            Once in Stamford I had to take not one, not two, not three, but four escalators, along with thousands of other people, to get to the bus terminal. The bus, a big, hulking, noisy, creaky, dirty, almost archaic piece of transportation, made another of its dozens upon dozens of circuitous runs through the city of Stamford, and got me to my job on time.
            After work I took the train into Manhattan, where I met an old friend for dinner. A six-foot-by-six-foot chrome-lined box took me up 35 floors to my friend’s office. There must have been three or four hundred people in that tall, skinny building, sticking up from bedrock on the island of Manhattan. It’s tall, it’s skinny, and it’s planted on an island, but not once did I fear for my safety.
            Did I mention that it rained all day long. Yet, I didn’t get wet once. Not once.
            Certainly things can and do go wrong from time to time. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t recognize just how many things go right. With that in mind, I went home determined to write about that very subject for “Hey, You Never Know.” I had it all outlined in my head, other than the ending. I wasn’t quite sure where the idea would ultimately take me.
            So I got into my car at Union Station. I was low on gas. I knew of a station nearby where you can save a few cents per gallon by using cash instead of a credit or debit card. But I didn't have any cash. So I went to an ATM. It was unable to read my card. And that’s just wrong, dammit.