How I won the lottery

I almost didn’t buy a lottery ticket for the $1.5 billion Powerball. Good thing I changed my mind!

Normally I don’t buy lottery tickets. Why should I?

Didn’t need it. As I’ve often told people, I won the lottery already.

At birth.

I was born healthy, with two loving healthy parents and three loving healthy sisters.

Our house was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and it had indoor plumbing and safe water.

I grew up in a green, quiet, peaceful neighborhood, with pure clean air. I explored freely in the woods and creek without any worries.

There were no land mines in the yard or down the street.

I was born into a free country with all basic human rights guaranteed to me and well-established by law and jury.

I went to school every day and got a solid foundation in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and morality. No one tried to bully me, hurt me, or make me drop out of school.

I didn’t have to work until I was a teenager. My parents expected me to go to college, and they taught me to save money from the time I was five years old.

I was allowed to pursue whatever interested me. I was taken on road trips and saw most of the states in America before I was 12.

I don’t know how to calculate the likelihood that a person born on this planet in 1959 would have all those advantages, but it must be pretty slim.

All of those things were handed to me. I was born, I got my ticket, and I had all of that life of opportunity just waiting for me to spend.

So normally, I don’t buy lottery tickets. It seemed like pushing my luck.

This week, I was thinking about the odds of surviving  a ruptured brain aneurysm, alone at home in a remote rural area. Also very lucky.

That’s why I bought the winning ticket for tonight’s Powerball drawing.

Even though I don’t have a business plan for it, I know that when I win that Powerball, I’ll spend the money in ways nobody’s seen before.

I’ll do things with it that would make a lot more people lucky – in places where nobody has ever been lucky.

Today’s penny is a 1976. That’s the year Dad won the Ohio lottery – $100,000.

Luck runs in families.