“A bird just shit on me.”
My son said this in disbelief while we were waiting for the bus at Houston and 1st, after a trip to the Nike Store in Soho and a nice walk across Spring Street then up.
He’d been standing out in the bus lane to see if a bus was coming. We’d decided we were going to wait for a limited even if the local came first. Then a man sitting on the bench in the shelter said, rather loudly, that the local stopped a block further up, which we knew. Since neither of us acknowledge him he said it again. And again. And another man said a limited had come by a few minutes ago so the next one should arrive in another few minutes.
This was annoying to my son, as I suppose it would be to anyone, being told something you know as if you didn’t or couldn’t know it, having the obvious delivered as wisdom that not just anyone could generate and weren’t we lucky they were there?
He stepped back onto the sidewalk, said something just to me about knowing how the buses work, then said, more loudly, “A bird just shit on me.”
He showed me where. There was the primary nickel-size daub, greenish to ash white, with a wet stain around it, just below and a bit to the left of his hoodie’s drawstrings. And a similar secondary daub a little more left and down.
“I can’t believe a bird just shit on me.”
I told him we could hit it with the stain remover and put it in the laundry when we got home. Flashforward, we got the stains out, but at the time he was still clearly unsettled, so I said, “You know, people say that’s a sign of good luck.”
He was skeptical.
“Really.” I said, “I’ve always heard that. I think they say that because if it isn’t a sign of good luck, then it seems like really bad luck that it happened. It’s like when someone says, if it rains on your wedding day it’s good luck. Ok maybe, or maybe it’s a sign you don’t have good luck because it’s raining on your wedding day.”
I wasn’t doing a very good job of easing his worries about a permanent blemish on a favorite hoodie. I decided not to tell him the old joke on this topic, where the type of bird is identified as a foo bird, and the bird’s target suffers immeasurable misery after wiping himself clean of the droppings. To ruin it, the punchline is, “If the foo shits, wear it.” If my editor thinks there’s no need to give away the joke, I’ll take that last bit out.
I’ll also add here that it did indeed rain on my own wedding day, torrentially, water pouring across the floor of the hotel’s 16th-floor outdoor space, wind whipping so violently it threatened to untether the canopy over the terrace at any moment. Sensing the possibility of us all getting drenched, the minister powered through the ceremony in something like 12 minutes.
Luckiest day of my life until my son was born.
On the bus ride up the avenue, he was still preoccupied with the stains that seemed to be burrowing into the material of his hoodie in search of an unextractable hold. We got out at our stop, and walking across the avenue he said, “Am I the only one that didn’t know this?”
“What?”
“That it was good luck to have a bird shit on you?”
He was so consumed with being shat on that he’d sent a message to one of his chat groups about it, and two of his friends had answered immediately. One wrote, “Dude, that’s good luck!” The other urged him, in fewer words than this, to be less modest in his sports betting this coming weekend.
He was astonished. I think it was more than just having the “lucky bird shit” idea affirmed by other sources, it was that his friends, with no stake in bolstering my credibility, were backing up what he’d thought was just another of my wiggy pronouncements.
We crossed the street and went into the gate halfway down the block then down the breezeway into the lobby of our building. A favorite among our several favorite doormen was on duty, one of the ones who has watched my son grow from stroller to scooter to grad school. He greeted us with his usual, “Hey gentlemen, how’s it going?”
My son said, still in disbelief, “A bird just shit on me!”
And reacted with a ramped up level of disbelief at the doorman’s response, like he’d realized he was the focus of a well-orchestrated prank, days in the making, as if the doorman, my son’s friends, and I had rehearsed the whole thing, even up to perhaps training the bird.
The doorman said, “Hey, that’s good luck!”