And I just kept on, like I'd been keepin' on. I didn't figure things would change too much up until the day I died. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't living in misery, not like that. I had my friends, I had my work. I knew my boys were safe. But I was separated from the thing that, God help me, I was most connected to, that land. So this and that. Well, then the thing is I won the lottery.
Now I don't buy lots of lottery tickets, I'm not rich enough to pay the dumb tax every week. But once in a while, as the mood strikes me, I'll pick one up. Half the time I forget to stop by the gas station and check to see if I got lucky. In fact that's what happened when I won. Wilma down the gas station put out the word that the winner bought the ticket from her store but nobody had claimed it yet. Well, I hadn't heard about that but I stopped by to get gas one day and we get to talking. So I dug my ticket out of my old wallet and if it didn't have those same numbers on it!
So bam! Just like that I was the richest man in these parts. Haw. If that didn't perk folks up a bit when they saw me. Why, I was talking to people I hadn't hardly seen in years. I'd be in town walking across the street to the hardware store and they'd strike up a conversation and the next thing you know we were the best of friends and why don't you come by for dinner? Well by the time folks got the idea in their head that, no, I wasn't real interested in sure-fire investment opportunities and, no, I didn't happen to have a spare couple thousand dollars lying around to help them out with whatever circumstance they happened to have dinged up against just lately, that just kinda tapered off and we all started to sort of ignore each other again, the way God intended.
So that's the story with me and the town folks, but I gotta tell you about Jim and Tom and how things went from distant to frosty between my boys and me. I sent them each fifty thousand dollars. And told them not to be thinking of that as the first installment of more to come. Turned out they didn't see it just that same way.
Now Tom, he's the one went to college, ended up moving to that left coast but up north, Seattle, least he wasn't looney enough to go to California. Works for Microsoft there. But when I called him up once or twice to help me out with this damn computer, he didn't seem to know how to get around that thing much better then I do, so how good can he be at his job? Well good enough they haven't fired him I guess, so maybe there's more to it than I know about.
He had this great idea for some gizmo to put on the internet. He told me all about it, but it just went right over my head. So turns out he wants me to be an angel for his start-up, so I told him to talk English. We went around and around that a while. Anyway turns out he wanted me to give him just about every penny I had then if he was lucky and he could talk more people into giving him lots more money down the road a bit and he stayed lucky - he might just be able to give me my money back. And and a whole lot more, more money than I'd know what to do with. But he couldn't say when that would be.
So I told him I already had more money then I knew what to do with, and I could get at it just down the road there, in town when the bank was open. Any time I needed it. Let me tell you there's one thing I know about farming and money. Every year ain't the same. You show me a farmer that don't keep a good chunk of cash stashed away for the lean years, and you come back ten years later that man isn't a farmer. Least not on his own farm no more. So I wasn't going to bleed myself out so Tom could build his gizmo. I wished him well, but I'm not a gambling man. So he starts in on how I could come in on at least a share of his business, but by then I'd started getting an inkling of what I could do with that lottery money and I had the feeling I'd need just about all of it.
Then there was Jim. Now Jim's the youngest and he always did have the craziest hard luck stories that still somehow made some kind of sense. Even if you didn't believe them, they were always entertaining.
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