Odds

If you don’t play Wordle, this likely won’t mean much to you, but – in case you do: this morning, I managed to solve the puzzle on the first line.

Yes, we are sitting pretty over here, thank you. Apparently, the odds of getting Wordle in one are about one in 12,972, or … less than one-hundredth of one percent. It’s not winning the lottery, but, hey – close enough.

I don’t share this small triumph to brag (everyone who believes that, stand on your head), for how much can you brag on one fairly wild, random guess hitting the vocabularic jackpot? The skill element (if there is any) doesn’t really kick in ‘til after that first word is played.

And yet … it just feels so good to beat the odds that way. To take your first swing and hit the ball clean out of the park (with bases loaded). To draw a royal flush. To sink a hole-in-one.

Funny thing: for some reason, experts claim, the odds of not getting the answer in any of Wordle’s allotted six chances are about the same as getting it in one. You’re actually more likely, they say, to guess the right word in four or five attempts than in six. Maybe because most people quit when they’re behind?

I don’t know. But the other day, for the first time, I didn’t get the answer, even with six chances.

Same odds, maybe, as getting it in one. But it sure didn’t feel nearly so good.

The Wordle win has me thinking of other odds ‘ve beaten in my life. The time I walked into the final exam of English lit having read only the first 10 pages of 1984 – and learning that the exam (a third of our grade) would be an in-class essay interpreting the end of the novel. Whoops.

Nothing for it but to extrapolate, based on those pages, where I thought George Orwell might be going with things. Apparently, he and I shared the favors of the same Muse: the teacher gave me an A+. (Good for my grade but bad for my study habits in years to come.)

There was the time I was asked to follow my friend in his car through the honeycomb streets of downtown Manhattan – a city I’d never been in before. I immediately lost him, thoroughly, in the Fifth Avenue traffic, took wrong turns onto at least three one-way streets, and then – 20 minutes later – looked up in time to see him and catch up with him again.

There was the evening my future wife lost her small keepsake key ring while running across a three-acre field of clover. I waded back into the falling night and – to my astonishment – found the thing, deep in the darkening greenery.

There was the afternoon my father pulled me, just four years old, from a burning truck only seconds before it exploded. And the moment on Belize when I found myself standing before a young man with murder in his eyes and his knife against my chest.

Everyone has their stories like that. Live long enough, and you accumulate a trove of such tales. Indeed, if you live long enough, it’s because you’ve beaten some pretty long odds just to do so.

Other odds, though are subtler – and maybe longer. What were the chances of finding, amid all the women of the world, this one I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed spending the long moments and fleeting decades of my life with? Of securing a lifetime of work that has challenged and honed my abilities, given me moments to serve and to shine, passed the time enjoyably, and allowed me to contribute to some nobler causes?

I live in a time and place in this sprawling, crowded world where I have enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, an air conditioner that works, and a measure of political freedom. What are the odds of my enjoying all of that?

“Well,” you might say, “that’s not so unusual. You’re an American.” But: 96 percent of the world isn’t. And a wild but popular guess among the demographics crowd suggests that 93 percent of the people who’ve ever lived on earth lived before I was born into all these amenities. I beat the odds again.

Sitting at lunch today, I was reflecting sadly on the fact that neither of the gentlemen with me play Wordle, and so could not be fully enough impressed with my achievement to justify the sharing of it. My ruing was nudged aside by the mention of some friends, and news that the cancer the wife has fought tenaciously for so long has come for her again. The pain is growing, the options are minimal, and the look in the doctor’s eyes is grim.

Cancer, and its collateral damages, have been the unavoidable fact of life for her and her family for more than a decade, overshadowing all the joys and rigors of work and family. A lot of people live with such things. But not most. Most of us, by the mercies of God, beat those odds, too.

“Beating the odds,” truth be told, is really just another term for “the mercies of God.” A lot of us have been doing the former for so long that we take the latter for granted.

"You're a gambler!" a fellow stagecoach passenger says, disapprovingly, to the hero of a favorite old western of mine.

"Aren't we all?" our hero, smiling, replies.

Yes, we are. And the best ones take their measure of the odds, cheerfully play the hand they’re dealt, and relish the game. For its own sake, and for the breathtaking stakes on the table each day.