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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. 


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