The Lottery Ticket
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2023-12-06
The Lottery Ticket
by Ken Homer • January 2011
My two older sisters hate my father.
I don’t think that hate is too strong a word, but if it is, I do know that at a minimum they have a lot of unfinished business with him.
This is a hard thing for me to deal with given the way I feel about my dad… I wish that they had managed to find a way to accept him as I have.
The path to healing my relationship with my dad has not been an easy one. Long is the list of grievances I could lodge against my old man.
In spite of, or perhaps because of that long list, I have come to appreciate that his failings, their impact on my life, and on the lives of my sisters were due to deficits he struggled with, and not the result of malice or cruelty, which is the interpretation they seem to operate from them when they speak of him.
I made my peace with the fact that the wounds he inflicted on his children were due to the ancestral scars that he himself bore and unwittingly passed along to us. Those wounds were most prominent due to the curse of alcoholism which had set fire to his side of the family tree. Our childhoods were testament to both his love for us and his struggle with forces that far overmatched his abilities. I’ve come to believe that it’s up to us to arrive at a place from which to weigh the success or failure of his efforts at coping with a life of disappointment, despair, outrage, and heartbreak, and to credit him for how he loved his children as best he could.
I loved my dad in spite of all the failures I could so easily cite him for.
And I know that he loved me and felt tremendous guilt and shame for his inability to steward me safely to adulthood – that state of being able to fully care for myself and others – it was simply beyond his ability but I know that he tried.
Today, while cleaning out a desk drawer, I happened upon his wallet.
I drew an unexpectedly deep and halting breath as I picked it up…
Given to me by his girlfriend a year after his death in 1986, I had packed it away a quarter century ago with nary a glance. My stomach clenched with the feeling that the next few minutes were going to be painful. I wondered if I was up to it.
There was a heavy coating of dust on it as I opened the folded leather.
The first thing to assail my nostrils was the distinct odor of must. A wallet is a container for must. There are, after all, certain things that a man must carry in his wallet. Things that our society dictates as necessary to be considered a legal person, chief among them the certificate that legitimizes us because we can operate a machine. Such a strange way to value life!
The order in which I explored the wallet of Justus Theodore Homer evoked a soft, sweet, sepia-toned tale in my mind. It’s a tale tinged with sadness, for his was the life that I held in greater esteem than any besides my own for the first half of my life. I was to bear witness to his worst darkness and despair during the tumultuous years of my adolescence which was not easy.
The first thing I took out was a picture of my niece as a young child. What grandparent does not carry pictures of their grandchildren in their wallet or purse?
The next thing I unfolded was an auto receipt – fitting perfectly with the remembrance of the man I knew who put so much stock in the belief that what you drive reflects some fundamental aspect of who you are.
My dad was a man who believed strongly that when you drive a Cadillac that you are automatically accorded some measure of respect from an unknown but appreciative audience out there somewhere. Because after all, when you drive a Cadillac, you have reached a pinnacle. When you drive a Cadillac, you’ve arrived even before you leave your driveway!
My old man loved that car in a way that some people intuitively grasp, and others will never understand. That was the first car I drove, and he’d have been horrified (as I am upon reflection) if he had seen some of the crazy shit I did when I drove off each time he gave me the keys.
Digging deeper, I found six more pictures of my niece and two of my nephew, his grandchildren by his oldest daughter.
I wonder how my sister would feel if she knew how many hours her father had spent fingering these nine small representations of her children now, long since grown to adulthood. These snapshots were precious to him, I can picture him swelling with pride as he showed them off to anyone who would look.
They were tucked inside the billfold area, causing me to wonder – was my dad intuitively enlightened? Did he secretly understand that money would always be a pale shadow of the true wealth that arises from the joy of seeing your grandchild laughing and giggling and growing into those who will carry on the family line?
Soon the archeology of the layers gave way to the final era of his life. Imagine my surprise and mild bemusement at discovering a concealed weapons permit. My old man carried heat! He had always been afraid of being overpowered. It was a defining characteristic of his that showed up early in my life and left some indelible marks.
In the summer of 1964, when I was but seven years old, the ghettos of the United States of America were going up in flames as the rage of the disenfranchised “Negros” came to a boiling point. We lived outside of Rochester, NY where there was a particularly violent riot that left many dead and wounded and caused extensive property damage. My dad’s response was to take me out to the town dump and place a loaded rifle in my hands. He taught me how to shoot with deadly accuracy at the threats posed by glass jugs, tin cans, and the occasional rat that had the misfortune to come into my line of sight; all the while implanting into my mind images of hate and mistrust for people whose skin color was darker than my own.
Paradoxically, he was kind and caring toward the African American people he hired to work for him in the department stores he managed. They were good people as individuals he told me, you just couldn’t trust them as a race was all. It was a lesson I wish I had never received, especially from him.
I felt a slight tremor of horror as I thought of the man he had become in the final two years of his life carrying a loaded weapon. He was a man with a mind partially unhinged, thanks to the loss of oxygen to his brain during surgery to remove a cancerous chunk of his right lung. No way should he have been allowed to carry a weapon. His eyesight was no longer good and could have easily done someone grievous injury either by mistake or on purpose. I’m so thankful he never needed to draw that weapon.
Finally, I came to the last compartment and the contents began to reflect his final months.
His Blue Cross/Blue Shield card, a couple of appointment slips from doctor’s visits, and a few medical bills that were deducted from his meager savings account at Casco Bank:
$65 office visit $22 pharmacy $95 emergency roomThe lung cancer eventually made the use of the wallet obsolete, and I was down at last to the final two items of the contents.
A tri-part paper license issued to: Justus T. Homer by the Great State of Maine c. 1985.
It bore all the vital statistics that the state records as worthwhile:
Height: 5' 8" Weight: 150 Eyes: Blue Hair: Gray D.O.B. 8/14/15The very last thing I found in my father’s wallet was a lottery ticket.
In spite of the odds stacked against him my dad always believed he could be a winner.
Today, some twenty-five years after he drew his last breath his lottery ticket hit the jackpot – he’d become a winner in my heart.
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