A most unfortunate incident occurred yesterday. While shopping at the market, Jia Hui stepped into a pile (she describes it practically as a mountain) of fresh dog shit. This recalled a similar incident that happened when we were in South Africa. We had bought some coffee and were sitting outside drinking it when, with all the precision of a multi-million dollar laser-guided Smart bomb, the likes of which have recently been destroying Osama bin-Laden's cavernous interior decorating, a pigeon dropped it's load with a plop into Jia Hui's coffee. She was mortified, but I tried to reassure her that we regard a bird crapping on you as a lucky thing. She was not entirely convinced.

In a country where luck is associated with numbers, colours, clothes, names, days, months, years, fortune tellers and gods, bird droppings, quite naturally, seem like an unlikely substitute. There is no logic to considering the luck of bird shit on a par with all the other potentially lucky alternatives. Nonetheless, perhaps in the hope of salvaging some good from her misstep, Jia Hui asked if dog shit was also lucky. You have to be kidding.

This raises an intriguing question which, to my knowledge, no philosopher has yet considered: why is a bird dropping on you lucky, while stepping in dog shit is not? The simple answer is "Size". As with most things in life, size is everything. We celebrate the biggest this, the smallest that, the longest the-next-thing and the shortest the-thing-after-that. Sizes that fall between these extremes of size are simply not noteworthy, and at times unfortunate. As is the case with dog shit. It is considerably smaller than an elephant's pile, but equally considerably larger than a bird dropping, hence its unfortunate insignificance.

On the other hand, the chances of a small bird doing a small dropping into a small coffee cup is a never-to-be-repeated act of luck. Which raises another question: for whom?

28 April 2002

Dion Marc Delport

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