Am I Lucky or What?! -- Toastmasters Speech

You already know about this from my post of a few weeks ago, but here's how I put these events together for a speech from the storytelling manual at Capital City Toastmasters.

Storytelling Manual, Project #2, Let’s Get Personal, August 9, 2006
“Am I Lucky or What!?” 6-8 minutes

I’m going to tell you a story that I’ve already told to several friends. The variety of reactions I’ve gotten to this story is fascinating to me. Let’s see what your reaction will be!

When I was in Moscow in June to perform the wedding ceremony for my good friend Masha and her American groom, I made quite a few new friends. At the reception I got to talking to a 20-something young woman named Lyudmila and her brother, Andrey. I learned that their older sister, Evelina and her husband, Kostya are currently working on graduate degrees at Baylor University – yes, our Baylor, just up the road in Waco. I gave Lyudmila my contact information and urged her to contact me and tell me how to get in touch with her sister. Besides being a friendly guy, I’m always looking for friendly Russian speakers with whom to practice my language skills.

I was thrilled when, a week or so after I got back from Moscow, I heard from Lyudmila and subsequently communicated with Evelina and Kostya. We discussed getting together sometime and then somehow the subject of rodeo came up. They had been in Texas for 2 years and never been to a rodeo – “Horrors!” I declared. “You have to see a rodeo!” And as luck would have it the Taylor Rodeo was coming up in a couple of weeks and they agreed to come to dinner beforehand and then go to the rodeo with us.

The most important decision about this evening was, What to fix for dinner? Since this is Texas, it seemed appropriate to grill out. Steaks would have been perfect, but we already had hamburger patties, so burgers it was! Burgers, coleslaw, beans, chips – a good American meal. To internationalize it a bit, I visited Sasha’s Russian Gourmet Deli and purchased Xalva and Kvas. Xalva is a kind of dessert that I first ate in Kazakhstan – like a lot of things, it looks disgusting but is actually quite sweet and delicious. It’s made from sunflower or sesame seeds that are pulverized and formed into something that would pass for a rock if you saw a hunk of it in the forest – but it flakes apart with a fork and is eaten with the fingers. Yummy. Kvas, on the other hand, is a beverage that looks good – looks exactly like root beer, but is really quite disgusting. It’s made from bread – somehow – and Russians LOVE it, why they love it, I cannot imagine. Evelina and Kostya loved the kvas and xalva and seemed pretty pleased with the burgers as well.

At 7:15 we took separate cars to the Taylor rodeo, which is just 20 minutes away. We got there in plenty of time for the first event, saddle bronco riding. Explaining the events and watching Evelina and Kostya enjoy them was a lot of fun for me. I felt like an ambassador of Texas goodwill. My personal favorite event is “mutton-bustin’.” You know this one? Where little kids cling to the backs of sheep, with the last one to fall off the winner. The most exciting event was the bull-riding. It is at once the most difficult and dangerous event of the rodeo, and as such is saved for last.

Near the end of the bull-riding, Janis’ cell-phone rang. I could tell from her expression that it was something serious. When she got off the phone the first thing she said was, “Everything is OK, . . . . but . . . “ You know the “but” is coming. There had been a fire at our house, but it had been contained to the deck. We needed to get home, so we said our good-byes to Evelina and Kostya and headed home.

Here’s what happened. Sometime after 7:15 the grill with charcoal still hot got knocked over. I suspect that one burger that lost its grip and fell onto the charcoal was putting out an aroma that enticed one of our normally perfectly behaved dogs to go after it and tip over the grill. Nobody was at our house, so nobody noticed that at some time the deck began to smolder and burn. But around 8:30 a young man who used to live in our area and now is a firefighter in Liberty Hill was driving up our road and saw the flames. He pulled in, found nobody home, called 911 and extinguished the blaze with our garden hose. A south breeze had blown the fire to within 3 feet of the back door, but amazingly the house was completely unaffected by the fire, except for the deck.

It was shocking to see the hole, about 6 feet across that had been burnt into our deck. And yet how much worse it could easily have been.

And it is at this point in the story that we get the variety of reactions. Most of my friends from work say, “You were sooo lucky!” But you know, for some reason, I didn’t feel lucky. I didn’t know what to feel. I was glad the house didn’t burn down, I was sad that the deck, which I had built myself was ruined, but I didn’t feel any of this very strongly, I wasn’t sure how to feel.

At church we got different characterization of this event. Most of our church friends said some variation of, “Well, thank God the house didn’t burn down.” Or “Somebody was watching out for you.” This is the theologically correct characterization for a Christian. All good things come from God. But was this particular event, the fireman who drove up our road just at the right time a “special” act of goodness toward us? Certainly there is nothing about us in particular to attract such benevolence. Why does my house get spared a fire and whole villages in southern Lebanon get bombed out of existence in roughly the same period of time?
There is no logic to explain this.

Why can’t I just be happy about this? My house didn’t burn down. I am happy, I just don’t understand, “Am I lucky, or What?!”