All day long I’d biddy biddy
This is a true story. Every Saturday, some friends of mine named Sondra and Dave do two things: They pick up Sondra’s dry-cleaning and they buy Sondra three Lotto tickets.
Dave hates to be the one to buy the Lotto tickets. He would never buy one for himself because he’s put off by the whole idea of the lottery, which he says encourages people already short of money to waste it on a hopeless enterprise. But Dave hates even more to be the one to pick up the dry-cleaning. Sondra has so much of it that they’re treated like celebrities whenever they come in.
On this particular Saturday, Dave, faced with that splashy entry into the dry-cleaning establishment, grumbled that he guessed he’d get the Lotto tickets. “But I’m not going to play your stupid numbers,” he told Sondra, “I’m just going to do Quick Pick.”
(Sondra always plays the same six numbers, a combination of their birth dates: Quick Pick chooses six numbers at random by computer.)
You can see where this is going. When the drawing came, Dave sank into the couch and watched as, one by one, all six of Sondra’s numbers came up.
“We would have won millions,” he told me, when they were able to talk about it, weeks later. “We wouldn’t even have needed the bonus numbers.”
When Dave told me this story, my first reaction was to be as happy for them as if they’d narrowly missed being broadsided by a car. The sudden influx of cash into anybody’s life has got to cause commotion, starting with a long line of relatives stretching into the distance, each with a hand out. It would be like the days when somebody gave my baby sister five dollars and the rest of us insisted on escorting her to the store.
Instantly, everything Dave and Sondra used to do for money, like work, would be subject to scrutiny; after winning, those things would have to be worth doing for their own sakes. Their friends would try to be cool about it — I know I would have been, only reminding Dave how much I’ve always liked him — but the money would stress all their friendships. Acrimony would even creep into their relationship as the government took half the money.
On the other hand, there are born into each generation a few souls blessed with the strength of character to cope gracefully with sudden wealth, and Sondra and Dave would probably have been among them.
I sense this just from her saying that if she’d won, instead of going on national TV to declare she was buying her mother a house and getting that long-overdue operation for her crippled sister, she was going to announce that she’d use the money to hunt down everybody who was ever mean to her. The two of them are calm so far, but another friend, Bill, is sure six months will go by and then Sondra will go out and shoot up a shopping mall. In the meantime, they have years ahead of them, a lifetime, to sit on their porch swing on summer evenings and replay that moment caught in time, that moment when Dave couldn’t take five extra seconds to play Sondra’s numbers.
Sondra didn’t seem very upset when I talked to her, and no wonder: She will be able to spend their money as she pleases for the rest of their natural lives, secure in the knowledge that a man who threw away millions can hardly have the temerity to quibble about how much his wife spends on, say, dry-cleaning.
There are born into each generation a few souls blessed with the strength of character to cope gracefully with sudden wealth, and Sondra and Dave would probably have been among them.