A Volkswagen Beetle – that was the family car I got to use; I never owned another VW. A telephone – because I like to talk on the phone – when did that change? A bible – can’t remember the last time I read it.<\/p>\n Some of the interests stayed with me longer than tennis: A cat – I had them as pets until 1998. A sewing machine<\/a> – I kept up with sewing until the late 1980s.\u00a0A guitar – also lasted through the ’80s until my guitar got stolen.\u00a0A bicycle – had one until 2002. Star sign of Cancer – I admit I still read my horoscope sometimes.<\/p>\n Yet, how little these things said about where I was going in life. They said more about the fact that I was a middle-class girl with pretty pedestrian interests.<\/p>\n But there were two charms that held everything else together: a typewriter, and a globe.<\/p>\n I knew I wanted to write, and I went to college to study journalism.<\/p>\n I wanted to see the world. Journalism took me there.<\/p>\n Did I lead a charmed life? It would be easy to say that I did, given the places I traveled and worked. And given that I’ve had lots of opportunities, and very few toils and troubles compared to so many people.<\/p>\n If you want to find out whether you have led a charmed life,\u00a0here’s a checklist<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although I can’t say YES! to all those things, I have enough of them.<\/p>\n But I think the list\u00a0is\u00a0even simpler than that.<\/p>\n Leading a charmed life, compared to several billion people on this planet and plenty of Americans, means that I have all the healthy\u00a0food I need, clean water, a safe private toilet<\/a> in my own home, a loving partner, no debts….<\/p>\n … no land mines on my route to the store, and no civil war on the interstate…<\/p>\n And complete freedom of speech.<\/p>\n I don’t need anything jangling on\u00a0my wrist to remind me of that. And you don’t have to leave\u00a0the U.S. to know\u00a0it, either.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 1975, my sophomore year in high school, when I still thought that “luck” was hitting a tennis ball.<\/p>\n I’ve been sorting through memorabilia, and found my charm bracelet from high school. Each charm was\u00a0supposed to represent one of\u00a0the meaningful things in my life. There’s one of a woman playing tennis. Well, I tried it for a summer. Spent most of my time chasing the ball. I think the charm was more meaningful because … read more Day 88: A charmed life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[102,306,80,95,307],"class_list":["post-5680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-102","tag-freedom","tag-life","tag-luck","tag-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5680"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5720,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680\/revisions\/5720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"charm](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Photo-23-267x300.jpeg\")
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