With a Little Luck

The first time I played horseshoes with Tiffany she got a shoe stuck in a tree. I've never seen someone aim so carefully and miss so completely. Her u-shaped piece of iron didn't make it even halfway to the pole across the way. Instead, it went straight up in the air, shooting through a leafy oak until it came back down to ring a sturdy branch.

"How did you do that?" I asked her, after I had removed my hands from my head and stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I held it just like you did and then I let go."

We weren't even dating at the time. Lucky for her, I wasn't looking for a permanent horseshoe partner.

Still, it turns out I found one.

Over Thanksgiving, the grown-up boy I used to play time machine with brought a set of shoes to keep us busy on the beach. When he and his mom ended up on one side with Tiffany and I on the other, I had a moment of preemptive competitive panic, visions of horseshoes being accidentally hurled into the ocean off to our left.

"You sure about your partner choice?" I called.

Tiffany glared at me.

"Remember to let go a little earlier than you did that one time," I whispered.

But it turns out the four of us were pretty evenly matched. We all hit the pole and we all missed it, and if Tiffany sometimes missed it more than the rest of us, well, a zero score is still a zero score. After we were tied for a while, we called sudden death. The first team to ring the pole would win. None of us had done so yet.

"Oh, so close!" we yelled back and forth until it was Tiffany's turn.

"Guys," she said, "I've got this."

And, would you believe it, she was right.

We all walked over to look down at the winning shoe in the sand as the sun began to dip into the water.

It was so lucky-looking and pretty that I had to take a picture. It felt like a sign of anything good to come, even if all that means is better hand-eye coordination.