Million Dollar Dreams

Lotto Winner
("Imagine! I won 200 million in the lotto,
and two days later found the love of my life!")

I bought ten dollars worth of lotto tickets last night. I was out to dinner with Don. He sat across from me in his white shirt (the rest of the universe has gone to casual Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc…but not Don. Somehow it all looks right on him-the pressed white shirt and tie. The dark suit. I feel like it is right for him. In fact I would feel let down if he showed up in jeans and a polo shirt). I wore jeans and a Polo shirt. Dinner was over. We had exhausted the conversation with the last little bits of gossip at our disposal and Don announced that he had to go to the CVS to buy lotto tickets.

Since he insisted on picking up the check I insisted on buying the tickets. We drove to CVS but they don’t sell them there. We drove instead to the liquor store on the other side of the Beach shopping center and they were doing a brisk business selling dreams for a dollar. We got in line and when we got to the cash register I handed Don a ten dollar bill. He laughed and added twenty of his own. I was a little embarrassed. Thirty dollars worth of lotto tickets.

I have bought lotto tickets before. I usually buy one. In fact I buy lotto tickets regularly-about once every two years-and I have never bought more than one. Last night I bought ten. Don bought twenty.

I have not checked the numbers yet today. If I win I will take Liz out to the Grand Canyon in a helicopter (like Don and Diane just did on their vacation to Las Vegas) and we will drink champagne in the depths of G-d’s great creation. Of course Don and Diane will have to be with us.

I don’t know what else I would do with a hundred million dollars. I used to think about that kind of thing when I was a little boy. There was a program on the black and white TV called “The Millionaire”. Every week John Bares Fertipton gave someone a check -taxes paid- for one million dollars. He used an elegant intermediary, a butler type whose accent fell just short of British English, to discretely deliver the check to the unsuspecting recipient. It was an innocent drama from an innocent time in the history of America. The person who got the check could never know who had given it (sedaka?) and they always needed it desperately. Mr. Fertipton must have done some bonzo research on his subjects each week (or rather the writers for the show did some heavy drinking) and it was a very entertaining show. Every one in the United States watched each week and they dreamed that some day Mr. Fertipton would single them out for the check and they would conjecture what would they do with it?? That was the real question. Boys, such as myself, would lay awake and dream of the stack of money and how we would spend it.

I also remember a small illustrated piece in the World Book Encyclopedia (I learned to spell encyclopedia from the Mickey Mouse Club. It was part of a song. Yes. I learned to sing the spelling of the word “encyclopedia” along with ‘Cubby’ and ‘Annette’ on the Mickey Mouse Club!) about the meaning and scope of the concept of “A Million”. It had a drawing of a pile of money and the pile was flying off into space (as if it were being blown to the moon by a giant, intellegent fan) and the description was “if you were to put a million dollar bills end-to-end it would reach…” I honestly don’t remember right now how far a million dollars placed end-to-end would reach but it was amazing to me as a little boy. A boy who read the encyclopedia that his mom had bought from a door-to-door salesman. It came delivered to our door and the entire red, faux leather set fit neatly on the shelves in my bedroom. I read it cover to cover. A yearly update was also sent via the postal service and I read it too.

Well the boy who read the encyclopedia has grown up. A million dollars might reach the moon and half way back but it won’t buy a tenth of what it did when John Bares Fertipton gave out his checks. If they remade “The Millionaire” today it would have to be “The Billionaire”. My father worked all day for the ten bucks it took to buy the lotto tickets in my pocket. Now it will just about cover the cost of a burger and salad in the dinner.

I think I will do a Google search and find a web site that will tell me what last night’s lotto numbers were. With the speed of light I will find the information on the internet. That’s how it is done now. The World Book Encyclopedia is in the land fill. Perhaps I will have won and I can give Don a check-taxes paid-for a million dollars. Through an intermediary, of course, with a great, deep, almost British accent.