Hi there, Lucky Husband taking over for the day. Erin has asked me to write a little bit about how the word "lucky" got to be the main theme of her blog and business. Well, my part in the story is the beginning, and it starts out in a pretty unlikely place.

Actually the back parking lot of a machine shop in a highly industrial part of Cincinnati is where the tale begins. The machine shop was owned by an old friend's family, and was managed by his mom. About four or five years ago, a sickly, dispirited little mutt started hanging around the neighborhood, digging around the dumpsters, and begging for food on the street. My friend's mom noticed the pooch and thought he was cute, so one day, she set out a bowl of water, and shared her lunch with him. That one lunch break was all it took to form a strong bond between the two, and the dog had made a more or less permanent home by the shop's dumpster.

Well, our heroine couldn't stand to see the poor little thing bumming around outside waiting for his lunch every day, so she moved him inside the shop, where he became the mascot for the business. This arrangement worked for a while, but soon, she felt sorry for him having to spend the long nights alone in the shop. (She may have also been influenced by the need to search the shop for his overnight "leavings" every morning.) Anyway, as seems inevitable in retrospect, the dog eventually came to reside in her house. And what else could you call a dog who had made such a long journey from the mean streets to the lap of luxury in such a short time? Obviously, the dog's name had to be "Lucky".

Well, shortly after Lucky moved in, my friend swung through town for the Holidays, and I went to his Mom (and Lucky's) house for a visit. I was taken with the dog immediately, and when I was told his name, I thought it was really perfect. It made me really think about the word "lucky". It made me wonder why we use names for pets that actually describe them, or imbue them with a quality we would like them to have, but with our own children, whom we love more than anything else on this planet, we just settle on the same fifty or so names, all from languages we don't speak, whose meanings we have either forgotten, or never knew in the first place. I started to believe that the names we gave our dogs, more often than not, have more meaning to us than the names we give to our children.

I started thinking that if I ever had a kid (a son that is, probably not a daughter), the best name I could think of to give him would be Lucky. My thought process was that everything that the child was going to have was going to come from either my genes, my wife's genes, and the environment that we raised him in, except for one thing....Luck. So the one thing I hoped my kid would have that I couldn't give him was luck. And I reasoned that if you name a child Lucky, it's probable that he will at least be perceived as lucky, which in most cases is what luck is. So I thought that naming my kid lucky would be the best way for me to try and wish him luck. I suppose it could easily backfire, and his name could become an ironically cruel kick in the shins if it turned out he was unlucky, but when it comes to matters like these, I think it's best to roll the dice, if you will.

Anyway, not surprisingly, Erin wasn't crazy about the idea of naming her child Lucky. But she got enough of a kick from it that it became the nickname for the unnamed kid we planned to have some day in the far off future. Of course, I think Erin's attachment to the name came not from a belief that a child named Lucky would be lucky, but from the belief that any child born with parents who would love him as much as we were going to would be very lucky indeed, a belief I can not argue with. So throughout the early days of our marriage (the time that Erin happened to be mulling over the idea of starting her business, which needed a name) there were always little references to the mythical child, Lucky, that we weren't quite ready for. We became very fond of this little Lucky, whom we had never met, but who had somehow taken on a personality of his own. I even wrote a song called Little Lucky, trying to come up with advice about life I would give him when he was old enough to understand me.

Well, that's how the name Lucky became so prominent in our life. I personally think Erin named her business Lucky Designs and her blog Lucky Me so that if we had a son, she could say the name Lucky was already taken, but you'll have to ask her about that. At any rate, so far we've only got a daughter, so we've never had to have that particular argument.