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

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

Going Solo

I miss my right breast. There, I said it. It’s not often that I allow myself that luxury. It’s been nearly twelve years since I had it. My late breast was warm and soft, lovely really, even if it was a shave smaller than its mate, and parting with it saddened me deeply. I could say that I lost my breast, but that would imply that there was some remote possibility of getting it back. It’s more accurate to say that I removed it for medical reasons, and replaced it for cosmetic ones. If I had known how much the laborious process of reconstruction would hurt, I would have taken a pass on the effort. When the plastic surgeon explained the process of stretching that would precede placement of the actual implant, it did not occur to me that post-surgical skin might rebel against this strain on its capacity. However, once you’ve committed to the risk, you need to see it through to the reward, which is exactly what I did. I tolerated the pain for the eventual trophy—a cohesive sili...
Read more

The Curse of Expectation

I had a disappointment last week. I’d submitted my book to an indie writing contest and the winners were to be notified by Thursday. I didn’t get the notification. It’s not that I expected to win. Wait, scratch that. My disappointment indicates that indeed, on some level, I did expect some kind of recognition. Maybe I wasn’t expecting to take the grand prize, but I was hoping for at least an honorable mention. Acknowledging that was the first step in being able to let it go. Once I recognized my expectations as a cry for validation, I saw them clearly as a self-imposed burden of proof meant to silence the inner critic who keeps raising doubts about my writing talents. My disappointment wasn’t about the quality of my work—it was about my need to prove myself. What I am learning—slowly, painfully, and inevitably the hard way—is that disappointment is an inside job, rooted in my expectation of how the events in my life are supposed to turn out. I keep slapping my preconceived...
Read more