Hi Everyone,
When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket?
Growing up in my family home, games of chance were verboten, forbidden, evil and a slippery slope to who knows were. Hell, I assume. Who hadn’t heard the comparison to fortune tellers, tarot cards, astrology? Or the tale of the three girls who went to the fair and goaded each other into the gypsy’s tent to have their palms read. Only one went in. The fortune teller told her, “You will be dead in three years.” And three years to the day, poof, dead. How? No one ever said, but the moral of the story was clear: no lottery tickets, no crystal balls, no palm readers.
Saying that, my father liked lottery tickets. He liked lottery tickets more than winning. I never once heard him say “I’d like to win” or even “I won.” When his health was failing, his bubbly caregiver would ask, “Harry, what would you like to do today?” His answer, while being hauled out of his recliner, would be, “Cross the state line into Missouri and buy lottery tickets.” At his age, it seemed like flying close to the edge, looking for moonshine in Prohibition. Like Bonnie and Clyde, his carer and my dad would gun the engine and escape in her two-door, white Hyundai. Who knows? It was a full day’s escape from resting, TV and a fifth wife.
He may have won something but I never heard about it if he did. He never even claimed he was a do-gooder, buying tickets to underwrite the government or some local charity. Unlike the first recorded lottery ticket buyers who built the Great Wall of China or those English gentlemen who took a chance on tickets for the establishment of a colony by the name of Jamestown, I think he just liked the Great Escape, “throwing the dice,” so to speak. On the other hand, maybe late in life he was looking for a Get Rich Quick scheme. I will never know.
I buy lottery tickets, sometimes once a week, sometimes less, usually never more. I buy them as a sort of celebration of my dad. He was a very funny guy. A storyteller. A liar. A womaniser. A man who turned heads, even on his deathbed. It never ceased to amaze me the mileage he got out of his aviator sunglasses. He was a rogue, a treasure hunter, and people loved him for it. It was never about the treasure, though, but always about the hunt. So when I buy my ticket, and put it away until I remember the object is to actually check the numbers, I think of old Harry F. (Lt. Col. RET USAF).
Sometimes when I have had a friend who was down in the dumps and needing a little cheer, after listening to her bang on forever or so it seemed about her woes, I would ask her to wait while I slipped into the local newsagent for one EuroMillions ticket, which over the years have cost anywhere from £1 to £2.50. Returning to my friend, I would present her with the lottery ticket. Now, mostly coming from the same sort of background as mine—lottery tickets, evil, quick trip to hell, etc.—she would frown, then laugh, then surprisingly snatch it from my hand. “You never know,” I say, and amazingly the woebegones are woebegone. My cheerful amie is off and running, as if we’d snuck over the state line, run too close to the wind, bought contraband.
One day I asked my PA to pick up my lottery ticket and a bottle of gin for a friend’s birthday. When he came back with the ticket and gin in hand we had a laugh. “No,” he said, “no one saw me, but the teller gave me a very sad glance.” I am not sure why lottery tickets get such a bad rap. They do build walls, hospitals, cannons for Philadelphia back in the day, support the arts and sports, etc. Some say they’re an easy tax.
While the word “lot” originates from the Dutch noun meaning fate, I think a lottery is however you choose to look at it—destiny, outcome, fortune. It is a game of chance, underwritten by the pleasing notion that it is entertainment, enlightening, spirit lifting, blissful, daring and a bit of fun. That is the uplift. Not winning, or making a fortune, although who would say no to that? It is, I think, the happy affluence of hope.
So here’s wishing you a lucky September, with an awesome twist of fate!
Love,
Marlene
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