History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Ten by Dave Jaffe

  History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Ten




         Despite all the favourable conditions I was living with, in the 1970's, my life tumbled on a diownward slope. Then I was lucky again. I met a man who taught me survival skills. He taught me how to access social prgrams. He guided me into an unorthodox therapy that cured me of my sadness and damped down my ferocious temper. He also taught me how to write journalism. And this helped me get jobs.
     "This man was the greatest guidance counselor I ever had," I told a woman who also knew this man too. When his grip fastened on me too tightly, I escaped into the world of anti-poverty movements. Once in this milieu I met two other men. One man guide me to apply to live in a housing co-op. Another helped me get a handicapped allowance. A third man gave me a book on drawing that transformed my life. All of these events and people turned my life around.
     In my early 30's, I was a depressed abusive handicapped man. Ten years or so later I had become a more stable balanced human being who felt happy and secure. In the film 'Match Point' the tennis pro Chris Wilson over a dinner in an upscale London restaurant agrees that hard work is mandatory for any success in life. Yet luck and fate, he insists, counts most of all if you're going to thrive. I agree with Wilson and now in the closing days of my life I tell myself and others, "I've sure been lucky."
      Henry Ford may well have been correct when he said, "History is bunk. Yet I now see that luck has enabled me to escape the terrible events that clutter up history books.