Karma Police
“Damn it boy! Now you gunna have seven years bad luck!”
That was what my Granpa told me when I was five years old and accidentally broke the old mirror that hung in the hallway of his house while I was pretend sword-fighting with a broom. I never knew what bad luck, or luck in general was all about at that point in my life; I only knew that bad luck must mean getting a whuppin’ with a peach tree branch. I never got to really ask him much about it, because Granpa was dead the next morning, found dead in his bed by my Dad. They said he passed peacefully in his sleep.
As I grew older, I heard more and more about luck, both good and bad. Some called it auras, some called it fate; but the one that seemed to feel right was karma. Doing good things could bring you good karma, doing bad things brought bad karma. And, like luck, I felt that karma could be influenced by the same actions, and I saw enough of it happen to believe it.
In high school, I once saw our football coach walk under a ladder that was being used by painters in the gym. The next day, Coach Clark fell off the top of the bleachers at the football field and broke his neck. While I was in college, I dated a really cute girl named Amber. During a heavy thunderstorm one day, she opened her umbrella inside the student center before going out into the rain. On her way home later that evening, she lost control of her car and sailed right over an embankment; the authorities said that she most likely died on impact and felt no pain when the car caught fire and burned. During her funeral, I watched a woman absent-mindedly step on someone’s grave; I saw in the next day’s newspaper that she had been fatally shot later that evening in an attempted robbery at her home.
I always tried to teach my friends and family about bad karma, hoping they would be able to avoid such fates, but some people just can’t help but to tempt fate. Just a few hours ago, my wife had told me about one of those silly “bad luck if you delete” chain emails that she had trashed. I just have to shake my head and wonder why people just don’t believe in karma. Right now, she is upstairs taking a nap after I had slipped a couple of crushed Ambien into her coffee, while I am downstairs setting fire to the drapes with a lit candle and watching the fire spread to the carpet. As I walk out the door to my car, I wonder just how many times I will have to do this before people start to believe in bad karma.
