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LuckNovember 20, 2007 A few years ago a friend gave me some scratch tickets for my birthday. They won me a little money, which I used to buy more scratch tickets, which won a little less money, and pretty soon I was spending my own money and getting hooked on the whole thing. So I quit. My ambition since then has been to be the first person in history to win a lottery jackpot without buying a ticket. So a week ago last Saturday, Sandy Grant, who lives in Edgartown, won $10 million with a $20 scratch ticket. According to the Martha's Vineyard Times story, this is "the largest instant prize in the history of lotteries in the United States." Sandy Grant is a lifelong islander who gets by in the usual catch-as-catch-can island ways. She waitresses, she drives a tour bus -- and she's the island's #1 horse transporter. She brought Allie to the Vineyard eight years ago. We have a nodding acquaintance. This is probably as close as I'll ever get to a big lottery winner. (True, a guy on my old street in Vineyard Haven won a big prize a few years back -- nowhere close to $10 million big, however -- but when he won I'd never met him, though I knew his name.) Sandy bought her ticket at Our Market, which is where I buy my beer. That tempted me -- maybe luck does brush off? maybe lightning doesn't strike twice either -- but I was humming Kevin Keady's scratch-ticket song, "Instant Winner," about a guy who every morning "stops at the convenience store / for cigarettes, hot coffee and two tickets from the instant lottery" --
-- while "Won't Get Fooled Again" played in the background. "What if . . . What if . . ." has slipped into my brain more than once since I read the news about Sandy in the paper. "What if" has been pretty active around the Vineyard, I guess. If someone I didn't know in a state I'd never visited struck it rich, the news would barely blip my radar before vanishing into limbo. A nodding acquaintance, living in the same place, crossing paths on a regular if infrequent basis -- all this makes a difference. A couple years ago a writer got a $2 million advance for her first novel. Mud of the Place isn't a $2 million novel, but as far as I could tell, this woman's book wasn't either, so I had a few fantasies about what I'd do if Mud hit the jackpot. What if? I can't really wrap my head around the idea of 10 million dollars. Two million is hard enough. Five hundred thousand dollars -- you can buy a very modest house for that on Martha's Vineyard, so it's conceivable, even if I have a hard time relating it to my income. On my income I think very small. Sandy just got a check for $500,000. This time next year she'll get another check for $500,000, and so on for 18 more years. My aspirations are based on $30,000 a year. Hand me a check for $500,000, and after I'd paid the taxes, I'd get Mud of the Place published. Very nicely published -- no cut-rate design or art or editing, and enough of a promotion budget to get it out there. I'd go to the bank and have them set me up a trust so I could work less for money and get more writing done and maybe even do something politically or socially useful. I'd probably have to decide between setting up an independent press to publish stuff whose potential no one realizes till after (against all the odds) it actually gets published, and making the squatters' speakeasy happen in real-time. After much back-and-forthing I'd settle on one -- then before I had too much time to regret the road not taken, another check for $500,000 would arrive. It boggles the mind, especially when it dawns on me that for some people these sums aren't mind-boggling at all. They're making $500,000 or $1,000,000 or (maybe) as much as $10,000,000 every year, and without stopping by Our Market or Cumby's for scratch tickets either. They hang around with other people making that kind of money. They think it's normal. I can't imagine living on $20,000 -- they probably have a hard time imagining getting by on $200,000. There's no shortage of stories out there about how fame and/or fortune ruined, or almost ruined, someone-or-other's life. Sudden fame and fortune would seem to be the kiss of death, or at least great misfortune. Sour grapes, of course -- most of it. We may say it, but I bet most of us are thinking, I wouldn't be like that. My head's screwed on tight, I've got my daggerboard in the water and plenty of ballast. C'mon, Lady Luck; try me.
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