Can By Chance

As I write this, I am refreshing myself with a cold beverage from the vending machine in my apartment lobby, of which I've written before. It's not the one that I had intended to get. That one is sitting in the refrigerator, awaiting its fate. No, the one I'm imbibing now is a canned lemonade, which I am not in the habit of selecting for myself. I guess that if I'm going to seek out any lemonade, it's going to have to be homemade. I wouldn't get a homemade soda. That sounds gross.

Undoubtedly you are wondering why I have the lemonade. That was my intention, so I hope you are. Perhaps you think that my first choice was unavailable, and so I fell back on another offering from the machine. In truth, the lemonade would not have been my second choice, or maybe even my third. I forget how many the machine has, but the lemonade is low on the list for me. No, I would have taken nothing if this was what I had to take.

I wound up with this lemonade because something special happened. There was a magical, marginal tipping of the scales a little bit more in my favor. Perhaps God himself pressed his finger on my side, or maybe it was sheer chance. Whatever it was, the machine spit out two cans instead of merely one. It gave me my preference, sure enough, but it also saw fit to give me something I wasn't looking for. I would have loved two of my choice, but it had other plans.

What could there be to glean from this sudden appearance in my life of a canned pink lemonade? Lemonade conjures in my mind a slow, hot, idyllic summer day. Perhaps on this day I have been doing some honest hard laboring, or (more likely) I am just enjoying to the fullest a day of leisure in some old, traditional fashion instead of some contemporary doings. What could that flight of imagination have to do with this twist of fate? I don't know, but the lemonade is sweet.