Orwell's Luck Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister, my grandmother, and I all sat together. With the girls' purses and everybody's coats, we took up an entire pew. We stood up to sing songs. We sat down to listen to words. We also sat down to listen to the choir sing and to pass the offering plate, which went all the way down our row with only my grandmother kicking in.
    The minister talked for a long time about achieving your goals in life, a subject he said was timely because this was Super Bowl Sunday, something I had not realized, since I am one of the few kids at school who does not keep up with football. I prefer shooting baskets and thinking about things.
    After church I hung out with Orwell and listened to the sound of ice being blown against the windows. It's the unique sound of crystals breaking by the thousands, the sound of frozen pieces of clouds shattering into even smaller pieces, falling into gutters, onto driveways, and into yards where the raggedy starlings are the only creatures brave enough or dumb enough or desperate enough to be out searching for food.
    I was getting plenty discouraged about Orwell ever walking again. I said to him, "Listen! Hear that? That's the sound of fat chances breaking into slim chances."
    But for some reason, I found myself saying a prayer for him.
    That night, my father and I watched the game together. We sat in front of the big screen TV eating our dinner from plastic trays that we balanced on our laps. When we asked her very politely, my mother brought us refills.
    It was about halfway into the second quarter—when Denver threw a pass over the heads of the Atlanta guys all the way to the other end of the field—when I first started putting two and two together. BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS . Denver Broncos. Atlanta Falcons.
    My horoscope!
    Then, when I heard the guys on TV talk about how the Denver quarterback already had one Super Bowl ring and it looked like he was going to get another, all the pieces just fell into place.
    BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS . Then a number. Then GRAB SECOND RING . But what was the number?
    "I'll be right back," I told my father.
    "Get me one, too," he said.
    I hurried to Orwell's hideout. Yesterday's newspaper was folded neatly beneath him.
    "Excuse me, Orwell," I said. "This will just take a minute."
    It wasn't the most pleasant reading I've ever done, since Orwell had been using the newspaper for more than a day, but you can forgive your friends a lot, especially when it's not their fault. Anyway, I found what I was looking for. A four-digit number: 3419.
    "No way!" I said out loud. "Nobody gets that many points in a football game!"
    Have you ever noticed how things that are obvious often do not start out that way? It's because you were expecting them to be something else. So you work really hard trying to figure out a problem, and just when you begin to look at it a little differently, all of a sudden your brain goes Bing! and the answer is staring you right in the face, as plain as a little brown rabbit.
    The number was not 3419. It was 34 to 19. BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS 34 19 GRAB SECOND RING. The Denver Broncos beat the Atlanta Falcons 34 to 19 for Denver's second straight Super Bowl victory! That's what my horoscope was trying to say!
    My hands were shaking when I sat down again beside my father.
    "I think I know how this game is going to end," I said. "I think Denver's going to win."
    "So it would appear," my father agreed. "So it would appear."

A tousle-haired boy
    On Groundhog Day the weather turned bitterly cold and stayed that way for a week. Even the most determined groundhog dared not venture out for long.
    Slowly, the unusually severe freeze crept deeper and deeper into the ground. The backyard goldfish pond, a little four-by-six-foot oval dug two feet deep and lined with black plastic, froze into a solid block of ice. Eleven black and orange goldfish, ranging from a few inches in length to two monsters each more than a foot long, were displayed beneath the surface in suspended