Surprises

When some unexpected misfortune befalls me, I often lament to my husband that life is full of surprises and almost all of them are bad. If there is to be karmic balance in our lives, it should seem that good and bad luck should be served up in equal measures.

Psychologists probably would say that we only take note of the extraordinary and the negative. The idea is that we take the good things in life for granted and only notice the bad. That's the psychologists' way of saying we're all a bunch of big whiners who fail to recognize how good we have it. Nonetheless, I do believe that, if we documented all the things which we don't expect which are bad and all the unexpected things which are good, the bad is going to win by a country mile.

All that being said, I do have things pretty good and I'm not going to complain about something. In fact, the whole point of this post is to place a note in my personal history about something someone did for us which was a very kind and generous surprise. Yesterday, the doorbell rang and, after we grilled the delivery man to see who he was (we don't answer or open the door blithely around these parts). The postman had a package from Amazon with the two sets of DVDs pictured below.

Yes, I like old movies, even bad ones.

These two boxes of movies were on my wish list and, at first, I thought that I'd somehow managed to accidentally order them and I was all geared up for a big bout of annoyance when I looked at the invoice and saw these were a gift from someone we hadn't been in contact with for years. Back when we were posting daily sumo results and descriptions of bouts on GEnie, we met a really nice fellow who we set up an exchange of video tapes with. He would send us U.S. television and we'd send him sumo footage. Eventually, our interest in sumo diminished and he got access to sumo coverage via cable or satellite and we lost touch.

The notes on the invoice we got said that he ran across our wish list and decided to send us these. It was a genuine shock to just get a gift from someone out of the blue, particularly someone who we hadn't been in touch with for so long. It just goes to show that spontaneous good things do happen when you least expect them.