I’m not lucky and I don’t gamble. Usually a wise combination. Yesterday was different — $266 million was at stake. Generally odds of 175 million to one aren’t inviting. But just the other day I had run over a little tiny nail, the one you couldn’t see unless you had a magnifying glass. The odds of hitting it were at least a billion to one. I thought maybe my luck was changing.
So I joined the office pool for the Mega Millions lottery drawing. Since I had been the first one to boogie on over to the office of the fellow spearheading the purchase and fork over the $5 entrance fee, he told me to select my favorite number. I chose “4” and then told him to pick any numbers but that one.
The last time I remember winning anything, it was a giant Sugar Daddy sucker. The next week I had a cavity.
Traditionally, my life was full of unlucky disasters. “None of them earth shattering,” Mom teased, wearing a smile so wide you’d swear she stapled the corners of her mouth to her ears. Her close-set blue eyes twinkled. Mom had two excesses — wrinkles and optimism. The first made her loosely resemble a Sharpai, and the second checked her reality dipstick at a quart low.
What could she possibly have know about my life? Hers was different. She’d never been jarred off the toilet by a trembler at the crack of dawn. As if being tossed from the pot by the Whittier Narrows quake wasn’t unlucky enough, as I tumbled to the floor, a slew of cosmetics on a shelf over the toilet had splashed into the basin.
“Okay,” I remember shouting as I had each morning in reaction to my latest catastrophe, “who made this mess?” Sure, I had got it. The earth had moved, and in seconds a shaker had taken ordinary house chaos to shambles level. Yet, still I’d asked. Maybe I just wanted someone to apologize.
“Not me,” chimed four denials from under every available doorframe.
“Did you feel that one?” I’d asked when I finally broke through the busy circuits and reached Mom who lived eight miles east.
“Did I!” she exclaimed. “Do you know where the quake was centered?”
“Yeah, under my bathroom.”
“Don’t fret,” Mom, chipper as ever, had advised. “You’re lucky no one was hurt in the mishap.” There’s that foreign word again — lucky.
“Mishap?” I cried. “Every glass I own shattered, and…”
“See. I told you stick with Tupperware.”
“I’d rather die. You’ll never understand,” I’d grumbled, ignoring the obvious. “There’s bricks in my driveway from my used-to-be chimney.”
So I exaggerated. I didn’t have a chimney, but if I had, it’d been rumble.
I was long overdue for change from these long running ill-fated events — faster than Obama was making it happen. As I left work, my co-worker advised me to stop at at each business selling lottery tickets on the way home and buy ONE. I did.
This morning before work, I checked the winning numbers. I stayed in my p.j.’s, just in case I had no need to get out of them.
But I didn’t win. I blame the co-worker. The thing he failed to tell me was the route to take. I could have driven home through Pico Rivera where the winning ticket was purchased!
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