For those of you who don’t know the story behind the legend that is Calamity Jane or how this phrase came to be, here it is in short: her actual name was Martha Jane Canary and she was an American frontiers woman and professional scout. She acquired the name of Calamity Jane somewhere between 1872 and 1873 while on a mission/campaign in Wyoming. Her Captain at the time was shot and it was she who rushed to his aid and rescue. On recovering, Captain Egan flippantly said “I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.” And so the name stuck and became the moniker attached to many an individual over the years, decades and centuries, including yours truly. However, for me it came with a completely opposite, contradictory meaning…
Just like most people, I’ve had my share of both good and bad luck and I truly believe that the bad luck is what makes you really appreciate the good luck for all that it is whenever it arrives. But unlike most other people, in addition to these two categories of luck, I have a third – my hilarious, unbelievable, calamity-kind-of luck. It’s the type of luck that leaves you both cracked up in laughter and amazed to the point of your jaw dropping in amazement that such luck could actually happen to you.
From what I can recall, it all began on a family holiday to Singapore way back in the day. I must have been all of 7 years old at the time and it was my first ever international holiday. So you can imagine just how excited I was! But that excitement was nothing compared to what I felt when I learnt that my cousin and grandmother were joining my mum, dad, sister, brother and me on our trip after the two of them were done touring some other part of Asia. So there we were – seven of us in Singapore sharing two massive hotel rooms, with my parents and brother in one and the rest of us girls, including my grandmother, in another. It couldn’t have been more than our second day there when, while in an attempt to bring our extra bedding down for the night from the overhead storage cupboard, I also managed to bring down a large square piece of the paneled ceiling. Fearful of how my father would react, I called on my sister for help, who in turn called on my cousin, who then called on our grandmother. While this happened, I stood there in a semi-squat position with my arms at an odd angle and palms turned upwards trying to hold that ceiling piece in place. I recall someone in the room saying that I resembled the commercialised laughing Buddha statue with that posture but there was definitely no laughter coming from me. The only ones keeled over and almost breathless from laughing so hard were my sister and cousin. When my grandmother arrived, I thought, “Ah! Finally a grown up to help solve this dilemma!” But of course, my grandmother just had to join in on the laughter bandwagon. They only took two breaths – one to call my mother who also turned red from laughing so much and the other to call my brother who eventually came to my rescue with some suggestions. For the rest of our trip, every time we came back from a day out in the city, I’d rush to the reception desk, riddled with stress and guilt, to collect our room keys in a bid to intercept a complaint over the discovery of the broken ceiling panel. But none ever came my way and if news of it ever reached my dad, he made no mention of it to me…
From there on, it felt like I’d opened Pandora’s Box of mayhem – I lost everybody’s train passes which cost 25 dollars a pop; I lost a precious gold chain after my sister’s wedding after wildly dancing the night away with it on; I got taken for a ride for a sum of money that was pretty large to me; and most recently, I had an accident with my bike whilst five minutes away from home and after clocking in close to 300kms of riding through the day. But like they say, you live and learn. And so I’m learning, albeit at a cost!
