Skip to main content

Playing the Odds

My grandma was the luckiest person I ever knew. Buy her a scratch-off lottery ticket and it was sure to be a winner. Take her to the horse races and, betting $2 to show each race, she always broke a little more than even. Bingo games, Superbowl pools, it didn’t matter what—if someone was going to walk away with money, it would turn out to be Grandma.

She never abused her luck. She avoided casinos and saved her gambling for the church picnic. She also paid out her winnings to anyone who ended up to be traveling with her—usually her grandchildren and great-grandchildren—generosity being a hallmark of her spirit.

I did not inherit her luck. I’ve had pockets of good fortune, but not usually of the monetary variety. I never win the football pool, I only break even at the horse races if I stop betting early, and the last batch of scratch-offs I bought paid out only to other people.

Yet in the past year, I’ve found myself drawn to the lottery. Not the scratch-off kind, but the well-over-a-million-dollars-if-you-win kind. I had a dream—a vivid and very real dream—of matching up numbers. I can still feel the crescendo of excitement that pounded in my chest as I read off the winning digits in my dream, cross-checking them against the ticket in my hand.

My current ticket-buying habit goes a bit beyond wistful dreaming and may actually border on an expectation of eventual reward. Regardless of the outcome, the act of tucking that little piece of paper in my wallet feels like bottling enough hope to replenish my soul and reinvigorate my dreams.


On paper the odds are not in my favor. However, having had at least a decade’s worth of life experience opposite the favorably stacked odds, I know dangling dangerously off the edge of the negative side of the balance remains a possibility.

I've been the 1 out of 8 women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States, though at the time of my initial diagnosis, the odds were closer to 1 in 300 because of my youthful age. My pregnancy was the 1 in 100 that carried a genetic defect. My baby, despite dire predictions of stillbirth, survived her delivery, which was nothing short of a miracle, given that her particular genetic defect was only seen in 1 out of 200,000 live births at that time.

So, I ask, why couldn't it work the other way? Why couldn’t I beat the lottery odds and walk away with a sizable sum? The law of averages suggests that everything evens out with time. Maybe I'm overdue for some positive windfall.

Image for the news resultNow if you'll excuse me, I have a lottery ticket to check. 


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

A Private Funeral

On the day that I buried my infant daughter, I received a card from a distant relative on my husband’s side. I’d call it a sympathy card, but the hand-scrawled message from the sender negated any comfort it was meant to bring to us. “It’s so refreshing to hear of a couple choosing life over abortion.” Refreshing? That’s a word that wouldn’t make my top million descriptors of the experience. Was it excruciating, soul-crushing, and bone-wearying? Yes. Refreshing? Not in the least. I’ve tried, over and over again, to understand what would prompt someone to think such a thing, much less write it in a missive to the bereaved, but I can’t find a reasonable explanation, other than the fact that it’s easy to arm-chair quarterback the lives of people you’ve only met once. It’s easy to judge when you don’t have a vested interest in the case at hand. It was precisely that fact that led us to a private funeral for Anna. After months of being asked if I was going to terminate the
Read more

My Love-Hate Relationship with Teaching

I have a confession to make, one that seemingly meets the criteria of a mundane mid-life crisis: I love what I do, but I hate my job. I’m a kindergarten teacher by trade. I adore children—always have, always will—and have a natural affinity for the littlest learners. I enjoy watching their growth across a school year, the way they come in green and fresh as newly planted seeds at the start, and leave my classroom as saplings stretching toward the infinite sky of knowledge and understanding. I hate the metrics that are used to define my students’ performance (and my own). I loathe the over-reliance on a narrow band of assessment measures that ignores the intangibles of student growth and extinguishes the joy of learning. I resent seeing children reduced to numbers on a grid in the name of data-based decision-making. I cherish the time I spend with my students in the Zone of Proximal Development. I thrive on the everyday teachable moments that enable me to coach into my stud
Read more

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

I’ve been nursing a lingering cough since before Christmas. At first I didn’t think too much of it. I’d caught the upper respiratory virus that circulated through my kindergarten classroom, but after suffering through a few feverish nights and a week of congestion, all that remained was a mild residual cough. It stayed with me through the holidays. By mid-January my patience was waning. Any attempt at physical exertion left me winded, which hampered my daily exercise habit, which increased my stress level, which made me reach for comfort food...you get the picture. I found myself shivering in the evenings, unable to get warm enough, which was unusual for my hot-flashy self. Yes it was colder than normal outside, but I was chilled to the bone. Until I went to bed, at which point I started sweating like Frosty in a greenhouse. My frustration came to a head last weekend. Tired of being tired and sick, I dragged myself to Urgent Care. The doctor thought my lungs sounded clear,
Read more