Even if your whole life has been nothing but luckless drudgery, the fact is you can never be completely sure what will happen tomorrow. Maybe the cards will finally turn in your favor. One crazy day, they turned in mine – a little bit.
For years, I’d always driven to the same convenience store at lunchtime to get a printout of the winning lottery numbers to check against my losing numbers. There was a ritualistic sameness to it as I’d sit in my car sucking on a 32 ounce drink, checking the numbers, tearing up my losing ticket, and cursing myself for being stupid enough to keep playing this sucker’s game.
But on this day, I quickly saw I had picked three of the numbers. I opened the car door to go get my $3, but fell back into the seat when I saw I had four numbers. I thought I had somehow gotten hold of two winning number printouts, but no, it was actually my ticket. And then I suddenly realized I had five of the numbers.
My shocky, fevered brain then determined that I had picked all six numbers.
The tattered remnants of my soul shot out of my body and flew over the Circle K. I was free in a way I hadn’t been since I was a barefoot five year old running around my backyard.
But then stern reality reimposed itself, and I realized that I had misread the sixth number. There was an immediate physical sensation of crashing back to earth. After a minute or so, I looked at the printout and saw that I had won $1063 for picking five numbers. It was a long, long way from the 20-something million that would have almost gotten me completely out of debt, depending on whether my wife had gone shopping that afternoon.
I went back to work and tried to play it cool, but the ticket was burning a hole in my pocket. Was this little scrap of paper really worth $1063? I told my boss what happened, and he gave me the rest of the afternoon off. I made a beeline for the lottery office on Corona.
I walked in the door, and the lady behind the counter looked at me and said, “Let me guess, five out of six numbers, right?”
“How did you know?”
“Because every other winner who walks in here is happy, happy, happy. The only ones who look like their dog just died are the five-out-of-sixers.”
I cashed the check and went to pick up my kids early from after-school daycare. You have to understand that the father of a 6 and a 9 year old spends most of his time explaining to them why he can’t afford to buy them the thousands of things they’re always wanting. So when they came running up to me, and I shouted, “Tell me what you want me to buy for you,” they both skidded to a stop and stared at me as if I’d been body snatched.
That night I was careful to tell my wife “$1063, that’s how much I won in the lottery,” in that order, because I didn’t want her to go through anything like my ordeal in the car.
Some hijinks ensued the next day after my kids told everyone at school that their dad had won the lottery, but we weathered it.
Overall, my advice is to play the billion dollar lottery. But, have somebody else check your numbers.