Olivia Fowler

On The Way

by Olivia Fowler

We hear tales of what happens to people who win the lottery. It doesn’t always turn out to be a good thing. Especially if their names are released.

Think how it would be to be a nine-to-five person, faithfully showing up for work every day, and suddenly becoming the recipient of millions of dollars. It boggles the mind.

One winner tried to donate winnings to his church, but his church turned it down. One winner didn’t quit his job at Dunkin Donuts because he needed to work in order to feel worthwhile.

There was a man in Georgia who was slow to claim his prize because he said he couldn’t take off work. He might lose his job. And when asked what he planned to do with his winnings, he announced that he was planning to buy a double wide trailer.

A few winners go in the other direction. They buy everything in sight, wind up with 30 cars, two houses, a broken home and family scattered to the four winds.

When people are asked about what they would do with the money if they won, they usually say they’d pay all their bills.

But then what?

One group of joint winners immediately hired the services of financial planners and attorneys. They took their time. I don’t know what they did after that.

When we were children we’d sometimes fantasize about coming into a lot of money. Our thought process usually headed in the direction of finding gold buried in the backyard. Sometimes we’d go out and dig around in likely spots. We’d search for areas that looked as though the ground had been disturbed.

Once we buried bricks at the full moon, thinking they’d turn into bricks of gold. Of course, when we thought they’d been in the ground long enough we decided to dig up our golden bricks. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the spot we’d buried them in. So we spent several days digging in the general area but never hit the jackpot.

The source of the inspiration for this project may have come from the pages of Tom Sawyer and Rumpelstiltskin. Remember when Tom was trying to rid himself of warts through a spell involving a visit to the graveyard at midnight during the full moon with a dead cat? And everybody knows about the girl who could spin straw into gold in the tale of Rumpelstiltskin.

So it all makes a crazy kind of sense if you’re at the age where fantasy and reality are entwined and there are no limits to possibility.

We didn’t have a plan for what we’d do once we dug the gold up.

I don’t know what I’d do if I won millions of dollars. Probably drop dead from the shock.

I asked Fowler what he would do if he won the lottery, and he said he’d buy a zero-turn lawn mower with a leaf bag attachment. That’s all he wants. But for right now, he said he’ll settle for a new rake.