[image error] LUCKY BLUNDERS

Joseph Campbell in Hero With A Thousand Faces talks about blunders as doorways to destiny: "A blunder is an example of the ways the adventure can begin. Blunders are not the merest chance; they are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself.

I believe in fairy tails, in the lucky blunder, the animal helpers on the road, the wise old woman and the wise old man, trolls, little folk, interested ghosts and talking wolves, but can you hope and pray for a blunder? Who would ever do that?
Recently, my husband made such blunder—not on purpose, of course--indeed, he thought he was doing just right. He saw his Pathophysiology professor at Price Chopper grocery store right after the exam. He called, "Hi, hi Professor. How are you?" Exuberant greetings are not the norm in China, so after recovering from the shock of American exuberance, my husband always tried to emulate this, and somewhat overshoots, not knowing exactly where the line is for such strange performances. I wasn't there, but perhaps he overshot the line in this case. The man said, "What are you doing at Price Chopper." My husband replied cheerfully, "Well, I just took the exam and need eat some meat to renew my strength!" They both laughed. The Professor then said, "How do you think you did?" My husband said "not very well." Later that night the professor e-mailed the director of the program that my husband had "approached" him at Price Chopper and made him uncomfortable. The next day, my husband was summoned to the director's office and ordered roughly to sign a form stating that he had violated student ethics code #^5@9 prohibiting students from approaching teachers off campus in their personal time. The director raised her voice and thrust a pointing finger in his face. Glancing down at the form, he saw the word "violated" and thought he was being accused of being violent. He refused to sign, which made the director very angry. She said she would give him 24 hours to sign.
What could be the meaning of this unexpected assault? We both felt as if we had been punched in the stomach. At home we crumpled and actually could not move for several hours. I sat on the floor with my head between my legs. My husband, who had endured this encounter about six hours before I learned about it, had not been able to do anything, including eat or work, all day. We asked our long-time friend Dr. Thomas Triscari for help. He called the director and assured her that my husband was not a threatening individual; to the contrary, he knew him well and could vouch for his character: he is a hard-working, determined, and talented individual faced with awesome challenges as a mid-life Chinese immigrant to America. He just happened to be at Price Chopper, truly.
The fateful accidental meeting with the professor turned out to be a lucky blunder. In the end, the director dropped her hostility along with the false charges and referred my husband to a tutor. Exactly what he needed! I had tried to help him with his courses, but I work full time in addition to several overnight shifts per week—and more importantly, am not a teacher and do not know how to present the information in digestible chunks. Despite hours and hours of studying, my husband was still floundering. Now at last a small door had swung open, and he would make progress.
The question remains why the teacher reported to his program director that he was being harassed, when in fact, he had a chance meeting with a student who was already shopping in a public place. This is the part that is really upsetting, because even though we knew he had it all wrong and was operating out of some misperception, peculiar fear, or unexamined prejudice; he had more credibility, more clout, more power than we did. It seemed as if he were trying to get my husband kicked out of the college.
Friends in high places? Yes, we have exactly one. If we didn't, as many don not, the course of our lives could have been altered forever because of one teacher's misperception (let us hope it was only this).