First, my thanks to Jim Geraghty for this priceless seasonal greeting, which explains why I'm willing to recognize a holiday I usually don't:
"
Happy Halloween! Try your best, ghosts and goblins. We live in a world with North Korean nukes, opioid addiction, Antifa, Russian hackers, a mass shooting in Las Vegas that still lacks a revealed motive, and Harvey Weinstein. Honestly, by comparison, ghosts and goblins are kind of relaxing.
"
Russian hackers? Oh dear, I hope that's not where my Russian readers have been this weekend? The computer shows a lot of Turkish readership, which may be bad, or not, and an increase in Italian readership. Well, salaam alaikum Turkish readers, benvenuti Italian readers, I hope you're all here with good intentions and I hope some of you will go to Google + and socialize a bit. Russians, too.
Now the status update: Last week I accepted a serious writing contract and spent most of my online time, and substantial amounts of my offline time, writing an e-book. The payment for the e-book is supposed to be more than I've made in any two Fridays...any two days in any market since the early days in Duffield. That's a good thing, because I wasn't able to go to Friday Market at all.
I had the e-book to finish. I hadn't left enough of it to need more than one hour to finish, on Friday, under ordinary circumstances. Circumstances have not been ordinary. I've been having a lot of celiac reactions to food that is naturally gluten-free but has evidently been contaminated with glyphosate, this fall. I've been sick as a mule through all of October and most of September. The celiac reaction itself is limited, but it compromises immunity to everything else...Some sort of boring little streptococcal infection has been going around. Early last week I noticed my usual reaction to streppy-bugs: bad breath, occasionally a prickly sensation at the back of the throat, and an energetic mood.
Then on Thursday I'd planned to go somewhere after the day online, and a car pool buddy didn't show up. So I walked about two miles carrying my nice warm laptop under my big thick blanket shawl, and the sun was bright and the temperature was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit...and what was going on? I felt cold! I felt tired! I felt as if I'd walked ten miles when the temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So I knew I had a fever. Also the back of my throat started to feel inflamed. Also instead of feeling energetic I felt exceedingly tired, spacey, and sleepy.
Most people don't become ill from most streptococcal infections so it's easy to forget, even if you've lived in the same house with someone who did, that it is occasionally possible for someone who's not already in a hospital to become seriously ill from strep. People I know joke about it, "If I have to go in I'll breathe on you!"--but it's not funny when someone is going through chemotherapy.
On Friday morning, in addition to the need to allow time to finish a writing job while feeling spacey, and the fear that I might actually be immune-compromised to develop streptococcal pneumonia like Old Sick Patients get, another reason why I didn't want to go into Friday Market was...that the weather was perfect. A friend was likely to be there. Her husband has cancer. If she was there, and I was there, she was likely to talk to me, and I was likely to breathe on her, and she was likely to go home and breathe on him. If I wasn't there, some other infected person was likely to breathe on her anyway, but at least she wouldn't remember me as the one to blame.
So I went in and fulfilled my contractual obligation and stayed away from this friend, thereby spending the last two dollars I had, and walked home. And it was a warm, sunny, delightful day for a quick two-mile walk on mostly level ground. And it felt to me like walking ten miles on a cold day, uphill. I still had a fever.
On the way I saw a garishly colored scrap of cardboard in a dry gutter. I often see them. People buy lottery tickets and throw them down without even checking whether the tickets are good for a dollar or two in online "Extra Chances" winnings.
I don't like gambling...but with state lotteries, as with charity bingo games, even though I see these things appealing to gambling addicts' weakness, I don't see them as actually gambling. When you buy a card in a charity bingo game you're donating money to a cause, and you may or may not acquire a piece of junk, which you may or may not be able to use, sell, or re-gift, as a souvenir. When you buy a state lottery ticket you're making a payment to a state fund. I'd actually support state lotteries as a desirable way to make taxation voluntary if they were covered by strict regulations that lottery revenues would be used to replace tax revenues and lower taxes, thus transferring the burden of taxation from frugal people to spendthrifts, which I don't see as a bad thing. The idea of being able to win the "Extra Chances" prize some lottery-ticket-buying wastrel threw away has always appealed to me. People who aren't going online anyway usually don't consider the "Extra Chances" prizes worth going to the computer center for, so...call it the payment this public-spirit-challenged person owes me for removing a piece of ugly litter from the road.
So I picked up the discarded lottery ticket. Lo and behold, the litterbug had bought one of the more expensive cards that contained two "instant win games, played separately" and hadn't even played the game on the back of the card. Wotta hoot! I took that ticket home.
I spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday sweating out the fever, sitting by the space heater, heating chicken soup over a candle, taking lots of naps, and agreeing with the cats that this business of being sick during my designated cat-entertaining time was a total bore. At some point, while sitting up, I scratched off the coating on the back of the lottery ticket.
Say whaaat?! It said "WIN"!
Ah, yes...I've been saying for a long time that when I win the lottery I'll remember how supportive various so-called friends and relatives have been since I became a rich man's penniless widow. Well, I remembered them. I remembered, as promised, what I've had to say to them for all these years:
Thptptpt.
And the $5 winnings were good for today's lunch and coffee, too.
Everybody wins a state lottery once in their lifetime, but, duh, what people usually win represents a big loss on what they spend. For me $5 is a real win. For the person who paid for the winning ticket, $5 was exactly the amount he or she paid...for that ticket alone...probably the amount the person paid every time he or she cashed a paycheck or went to the convenience store or whatever, for who knows how many years.
But in Maryland I knew a chap who claimed he never bought lottery tickets for himself, but one day he went to the store for a sick friend who specifically told him to buy a few tickets...and when they divided the tickets and scratched off the coating, he won the million-dollar jackpot. So he said. And I know his bank really did freeze his account for a few days while verifying his claim, and he really did retire.
I'm still feeling my normal reaction to the little streppy-bugs my now immune-challenged body hasn't completely wiped out yet. It's sort of a weird feeling to have, these days. I don't always know which members of my own generation are seriously concerned about strep infections, sometimes with good reasons, and which ones would be insulted by the idea that they need to take streppy-bugs seriously. I didn't feel bad about handing the card to the kid in the convenience store, but I felt bad when a friend came up to me in the cafe to ask if I was feeling better. I would have preferred not to get a good look at any faces, today, that are framed by even small patches of white hair...
Is it possible to find an Amazon book link to go with this story? It is easy. One of America's very best writers of scary stories happens to be remembered best for a hypothetical-scary-future story called...
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