THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER
In 1995 i went to the Goodwill to scout for bargains. I found a 1935 gospel song book with a dramatic art deco cover to send to Garrison Keillor as a gift, and as i was paying the 25 cent price for this little gem, the clerk, a big, blowsy blonde in her late 30s, noticed the four-leaf clover in my open wallet, in the plastic-covered window where people who drive display their driver's licences.
"Oh, wow!" she gushed. "Look at that! Is that real?"
I smiled and told her that it was.
That's when i realized that for folks who live in town, four-leaf clovers are a real rarity, rare beyond what they are for the rest of us. I have a couple of patches on my "lawn" (well, it's a green area, so i call it a lawn) where four-leaf clovers occur with much higher frequency than elsewhere. It's gotta be a genetic variation, like multi-toed cats and six-fingered humans.
When little kids visit, they like to search for four-leaf clovers. A few grown-ups do too. They've got to have sharp eyes to find them. Sharper than mine, anyway. Personally, i have only found one four-leaf clover on this property, and one a long time ago, in Santa Monica, when i was about eight years old. Sometimes the kids find so many four-leaf clovers on my place that they give me one or two. I press them in books and carry them around with me until they wear out. The one in my wallet was found and presented to me by a visiting friend. Second hand luck.
The four-leaf clover is among the commonest of North American lucky emblems and is an especially frequent image on good luck coins, and good luck postcards. Here are some other LUCKY W pages on which four-leaf clovers appear.