Real Life is not winning a Power ball Ticket. But I bought one
anyway. There’s a hefty number of shrinks who will tell us all that “it’s
gambling”, “it’s the thrill of it”, etc. that keeps us buying those little
orange tickets. I would agree with most of that over-analyzing, but I don’t
feel guilty for falling prey to the hype of winning a billion dollars.
My Mom and I sat in a Chinese restaurant last week and made
a pack to buy two tickets using our the numbers from our recently opened
fortune cookies. We would split the billion in half. We shook on it. Sounds
relatively innocuous for a lunch time topic, but what ensued after that was far
from our normal days together.
We laughed. And laughed again. And again – coming up with
all the things we were going to do with our winnings. My Mom and I used to
laugh all the time over silly things, but as we have both aged, it doesn’t seem
to happen that we act like high school freshman, giggling and belly-laughing at
our own humor. Ours was an irreverent humor that we shared, laced with sarcasm and cynicism, often totally ridiculous and usually not PC.
If I listed all the things she said, you would probably
yawn…it was clearly one of those moments where “ya had to be there” to laugh
now. As we were driving over the bridge to Marysville, she dead panned “I
know, I’ll buy Marysville”. If you grew
up in Marysville, a town surrounded by a levy system that is stagnating because
of it’s non-growth and old school
politics, you’d get how funny that was.
At another point in the car, she told me that even if we one $4 dollars,
she wanted her half…because she needed some stamps. I was dying! I told her for
a million bucks I would manage her money for her, which sent her off into a
coughing fit. And I reminded her that when she croaked, I would still get more
money that she did, as I would inherit my "daughter's" share of her estate.
It wasn’t so much the notion that we had a snowball’s chance
in hell of winning, it’s that it was a “good” day. Mom is soon to be 91 and she said that day
that she’s starting to “feel” old. We have our shopping days together every two
weeks, and usually talk about innocuous things. I bring her up to speed with
the going-on with the kids and their families, etc.
She’s from a different era than I, lived in the country the
better part of her whole life. We have the typical mother-daughter issues
that I have spent years trying to overcome. I pretty much avoid the tricky
topics (I leave those to Dave who adores his occasional porch-side political chats
with her). I guess I hadn’t realized that we hadn’t laughed a lot together in years
like we used to...until we laughed together over Power Ball. The price of the ticket was worth it.
It was a good day. Even if we didn’t win.
