I want to say something about dreams around “what I would do with my winnings”. It’s involves my experiences during a 3 year period in my life when I literally was making more money than I sensibly knew how to manage. And the big lesson from that period isn’t the obvious one about me being a fool. That little trait (probably) remains intact. Nope, what happened to me made me increasingly uneasy through its growing frequency and by the end, actually had me frightened. What I’m talking about is the number of occasions where I found myself confronted by people in REAL need. And I’m not talking about starving people in Ethiopia, but more about literally tripping over people I knew and cared about who would need money for everything from bail through preschool tuition or rent to stave off eviction. It took me a short time to notice the trend, and I remember having discussions with my wife about how rare these things were back when we were “scraping by”. One day I was sitting at my desk drooling over some catalogs of stereo equipment as the wife readied herself for our trip to the House of Music to drop a planned $2400 dollars of an expected $3000 windfall on stereo components. As we headed for the door the phone rang, and the wife (to my annoyance) ran over, picked up the receiver and with a girlfriend she’d grown up with but hadn’t heard from in years. I stood by the door probably rolling my eyes and feeling irritated unti I noticed that the expression on my wife’s face was growing ever more concerned, until she finally said “Listen, I’ll talk to Stan & call you right back”. It turned out that the woman who’d been a telephone operator fo some 15 years had been out sick for 6 months with a lung infection that had gone to pneumonia and left her permanently disabled. She was a single mother with 2 teenage girls and dead broke. She was 2 months behind in her rent and the landlord was in the process of pulling the plug. She was calling around trying to get help, when a former classmate told her that the wife was “flush”. After listening to this, I asked the wife “How much does she owe the landlord” To which she replied $2400. I swear I hadn’t had a religious thought in years, yet instantly looked directly at the ceiling and yelled “what is this, some kinda test?” The hour required to drive the 50 miles or so to drop off the money was one of the more productive hours of my life, because I came to appreciate the meaning of something that had puzzled me my entire previous Catholic youth, that parable about the rich man, camel and needle, and l’ve been depressed at the thought of it every time it comes up since the day I figured it out, because if there is a God, I know He must look at me and laugh His ass off.
That incident was better than 30 years ago. And only a fool would place a pile of stero equipment on a scale opposite a homeless woman and 2 children and call it “a test”, because the answer is simply forced. So it wasn’t a test, but if anything, a lesson so stark that even a fool couldn’t miss it. And apparently (in my case) that’s what is required.
So the good times of surplus money vanished faster than my youth, optimism and sense of humor. The poor long suffering woman finally expired a few years ago swearing her daughters to make good on her debt. They turned up together at our house and gave us $3000 from her life insurance policy the day before another friend called to see if I could lend him $3000 to cover the deductible on the operations to partially restore his vision. So what’s the big lesson? It’s simple. You really can’t win. The way it’s worked for me, and I can’t explain it, when I don’t have it, nobody’s asking. My great fear is being directly confronted by need when the stakes for me or mine are real.