Four Leaf Clovers
When I was young I searched for four leaf clovers.
I was often alone, and during recess I’d sit beneath the trees in the field where a patch of clovers grew, and I’d sift through clovers, counting leaves. I’d grow fixated, ignoring the other kids, focusing on my patch of field.
I didn’t have friends. Some days I’d sit below a tree and feed sticks and leaves to the rodents that lived in the holes around the tree. My school was on former farmland, and so gophers were plentiful.
Some days when I’d search for four leaf clovers I’d hope for luck. I treated four leaf clovers like wishes, I’d wish for friends. I was a lonely third grader. Looking back on it, I can identify third grade to be the year I first struggled with depression.
I remember that year vividly, our classroom was a trailer. My teacher, Mrs. Ramsey, made common appearances in nightmares. She’d punish me for drumming on my desk by having me sit atop my desk, and drum as hard as I could until my hands turned red. I remember how she contorted my hands in every cursive lesson, berating me for never getting it right. One night I dreamt that I went to class and everyone had turned to zombies, led by Mrs. Ramsey, as I opened the door they all came charging after me. I remember being taunted by the other boys, for being Jewish, for having glasses, for being weird, there was plenty of ammunition. I remember Ashley, one day she was kind to me, and because I had so little experience of the other kids being nice to me, I found her a four leaf clover.
I’d search for four leaf clovers like I’d be digging for wishes.
When I was 10 my grandfather was diagnosed with colon cancer.
My response when I learned of the diagnosis was to find a four leaf clover. I found one in the field at school, under the tree. I wished he’d be ok. When I saw him next I gave him the clover, I can’t fully recall his reaction, but I know he had it laminated. He kept it in his wallet. He was never a superstitious man, so he likely didn’t believe in the healing powers of the four leaf clover like I did, but every time I saw him, he’d pull me aside, take out his wallet and show me that he still had it. He told me he kept it with him always, and whenever he went to the hospital, and had his treatments, he thought about the four leaf clover. This made me feel better, like he trusted in the luck I had plucked for him, to me it made the luck real.
I would continue searching for more clovers, and with each one I’d make a new wish. That he’d outlive the cancer, that he’d live to see me as an adult. As the cancer spread, my wishes changed: that he’d live to see my Bar Mitzvah, that he’d make it one more Summer.
He died on my 12th birthday.
Hope
Luck is the childish little brother of hope, but at its core, the genetics are the same. It’s the belief that, despite all the contrary facts, things will still work out. But, childish, or naive, as it may be, it is needed.
We hold to hope, we grasp, and cling. It’s a kind of wishful thinking, but what is the alternative?
I will admit that I am often a victim of cynicism. I get overwhelmed by the enormity of the world. I grow defeatist in the face of defeat.
Yesterday, as I walked the field during recess, I contemplated searching the trees for clovers. My daughter has spent at least a day each week so far in 2023 sick. She finally received tubes for her ears to combat the chronic ear infections, only to come down with hand foot mouth disease. A student stopped me to chat about class, and suddenly I am hit in the back of the head with a soccer ball kicked from behind me. It was an accident, or at least I’d like to believe so, but I couldn’t help but feel it was an apt metaphor. Some days just feel like a kick to the head.
It is often hard to be hopeful. My wife and I joke that so much of our sanity is contingent on a full night’s sleep. It had been a while.
I have found that having a child to be the ultimate test of hope. I have no control over the world that my daughter will grow up in, I don’t know if our country will be the same, the degradation of coastlines, of democracy. I don’t know if she’ll always be ok. I can’t control whether she gets sick, or hurt.
Already she has less rights than her own mother.
I can look at our world, I can see the facts, the doom, the inaction, and it becomes easy to lay down my arms, give up. Having a daughter means that I can’t. I can worry that she might be the last generation to live on a healthy planet, but I have to hope, despite it all, that she’ll be ok.
On even my hardest days, when I am functioning on no sleep, when each step is a slog, when I’m kicked in the head, I know that, for her, I need to keep going. I need to have hope that things will work themselves out, despite, sometimes the seemingly insurmountable odds.
I wrote before about the need for hope in apocalyptic fiction (Read it Here!), how despite the gloom, and darkness there needs to always be a light behind the clouds. And the same is true for life. The sun still exists, even if we don’t see it everyday. I know sometimes hope seems desperate, like grasping at air, but sometimes the weird kid feeding sticks to gophers is only one year away from making his first real friends.
Every story can be whatever you wish it be, it depends on the perspective. It depends on how the story is framed, where it starts, where it ends. If I were to tell you about the lonely boy who sat during recess picking clovers and feeding gophers, you could conclude that it would be a sad story, but if I kept telling the story, you’d find that soon he’d make friends, he wouldn’t always be alone.
Yes, my grandfather died, despite the four leaf clover, but instead of focusing the story with the end, I could focus on all the time I got to spend with him, singing Singin’ in the Rain with him, making up nonsense rhymes, listening as he taught me skills like sarcasm and smartassery.
I could tell you that for weeks I have not slept easy, worried about my daughter, coaxing her back to sleep, being drowsy, and unfocused at work, being hit in the head with a soccer ball. Or I could tell you that last night I slept a full 6 hours, and how she didn’t scream in her sleep. I could tell you that this morning her face looked far better, the dots subsiding. I could tell you how I finally exhaled, how I stopped clenching my teeth.
Part of having hope is patience. It’s knowing that just because things are bad right now does not mean they always will be, or that they have always been. It’s knowing that everything, good and bad, passes with time. Weather changes, clouds drift apart, every ending creates a new beginning. Life goes on.