Column: Tales from Exit 22

If your life were a reality TV show, would you watch it?

Would you watch yourself buying a lottery ticket?

I’ve never purchased a lottery ticket, but I carry a lucky piece in my pocket. It’s a stone.

There’s room for it in my pocket. It’s not crowded by money.

People like lucky pieces. I should say that we like good luck pieces. We can be lucky in a bad way, too. Folks gather lucky coins, stones, amulets, buckeyes, charms, clean underwear (in case one is lucky enough to go to the hospital), rabbit’s feet, etc. It could be said and often is that the rabbit’s foot didn’t bring much good luck to the rabbit. We gather talismans that we hope would keep the miseries at bay.

We know that it’s better to have horse sense than a rabbit’s foot. We realize that good luck has dirt under the fingernails and smells of perspiration. The successful golfer, Gary Player, said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Wise elders tell us that if we depend upon good breaks, we will have a good chance of going broke.

We carry trinkets purported to bring good luck because we don’t want to take the chance of not believing in good luck. We don’t want to become like those guys on the old TV show “Hee Haw,” who sang, “If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all! Gloom, despair and agony on me!” or end up like Joe Btfsplk, who was a character in the comic strip Li’l Abner. Joe was a world-class jinx, bringing misfortune to all around him. A small, dark cloud hovered perpetually over Joe’s head to symbolize his bad luck.

Yes, I carry a talisman in my pocket. I think I used it the other day. That’s the thing with lucky pieces. You never know for sure if the good luck came from them.

I was in a hotel room. My name tag was upside down. It was one of those irritating name tags that don’t like to cling to a shirt. It adhered well to the bottom of my shoe, but it was difficult for people to see there.

I called my wife. I had just bought a meager gift to present to her when I arrived back home, similar to what an ancient hunter/gatherer would offer upon his return to show his prowess in providing provender. I was wearing a safety helmet. I had been shopping, and I had used a credit card because thanks to the lucky piece in my pocket, there was no room for money there. I was wearing the helmet because there is a law that you must wear a safety helmet while using a credit card in California.

A friend told me that his credit card had been denied when he tried to use it out of state. He didn’t know that his credit card company wanted him to call and inform it before he did any traveling. I’ll bet it was because he wasn’t wearing a safety helmet. He was able to obtain funds from an ATM.

I have never used an ATM. Many refer to the cash dispenser as the ATM machine. ATM stands for “automated teller machine,” so an ATM machine would be a bit redundant. If I tried to use an ATM, I would be unable to remember my PIN that is required to dance with a cash machine.

And what do we call a PIN? We refer to it as the PIN number. PIN means “personal identification number,” so it’s another redundancy. I wouldn’t remember my PIN because men can’t even remember where the TV remote is.

When my wife answered the phone, she pretended to be someone else and adopted a Lithuanian accent. “How did you get this number?” she kept asking.

I assured her that I was the man she married, but she demanded to see that in skywriting before she’d believe it.

I don’t know why I bother giving her all those tiny bars of hotel soap.

It turned out that a customer service representative from the credit card company had called my wife and asked why someone was using my credit card to buy a chintzy $5.98-plus-tax gift in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

My wife admitted that she knew a man that cheap and coincidentally, he happened to be working in California. Thanks to her, they approved my purchase.

How was that lucky?

Because I don’t know how I’d have scraped up that kind of money if the credit card had been denied.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.