Wait, no. That’s not right. In retrospect I think it was ‘It takes a fool to get into pottery.’ That’s it. And that man was my father. Dad hated pottery, ever since he was kicked out of high school for pushing a potter’s wheel out a third-story window, which landed on the school’s mascot. That red-painted mouse never recovered from the head trauma it received in the incident. After that day, dad never forgave mice or the entire field of pottery for his failure to receive an education.

But the one thing dad did love, besides his family and possibly my brother Goose, was the lottery. Every week he’d buy as many tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes as the Hartwig family grocery money would allow, and every week he guaranteed us a victory. And, every week he’d lose on a technicality that involved filling out the forms wrong and picking too many numbers. Dad’s strategy was simple, yet elegant: he picked all the numbers on the sheet, figuring the winning combination would pop up in there somewhere. And every week he’d write another angry letter to the local paper about how he’d been cheated by the Irish Sweepstakes. It became a Hartwig family tradition, like singing Christmas fight songs and poaching turkeys.

Eventually the day did finally come when dad won the Irish Sweepstakes. Some think he just wore them down over the years. That evening, he gathered the Hartwig clan around his knee to tell us the news, and he related a heart-warming story of how this day had been his dream since he was a school boy and he had been required to read a short story called The Lottery. It was the only thing dad ever read while he was in school that wasn’t scratched into a toilet stall, and it changed his life forever. Dad put on his hat and coat, kissed us goodbye, and promised to smile down on us from heaven as he skipped out the door.

Boy was he pissed when he came home later that day with a big bag full of money.”

“Lottery”

Viking
When I was a young boy, no older than 24, my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He said “Sampson, I want you to touch me right here between my testicles until I tell you to stop.” My answer that day, as it always had been, was that I planned on being a Viking.

Different
It really made me think, and it hurt—the idea that I, like everyone else in the world, picked one different thing like religion, skin color, or sexual orientation to get all worked up about when in a lot of ways all of us are like one another.

State Fair
One of my fondest childhood memories is of Dad challenging us kids to guess the fat man’s weight, and the fat man coming out from behind the cotton candy booth and punching dad in the mouth.