Jason Philips just got out of the shower after the four mile run at one of his favorite places in Alexandria—the 0.6-mile asphalt loop around Fort Ward Park, a Civil War museum on Braddock Road a mile and a half from home. He routinely did eight to nine laps, thirty-five to forty minutes, and he got his runner's high. Another lap or two walking to wind down and he's done.
Glad to think, and feel, another week at work behind him, away from there at least for the weekend. Government bureaucracy, politics, corruption, all that Washington crap.
He was still feeling thirsty even after downing a 12-ounce bottle of Gatorade following the run so he got another one from the fridge and downed half of it right away. Coming out of the kitchen, he remembered the pile of post mail he dumped on the coffee table in the living room when he came home from work and went to dig into it.
Same old junk he dumped straight to the trash can, except for several charity solicitations he saved especially the ones that didn't need stamp. A couple of them, soliciting to ease hunger, once again got to him with pictures of emaciated children. Another for people in places with severe scarcity of water, places of drought and hunger.
Fuck! he thought once again as he had every time he was reminded of that.
He went next to the computer and checked the emails. The family and friends, work and personal business emails. The family email had one from Edward, reminding him of Thanksgiving and saying they would love to have Jason's sister Ellen and daughter Tess join them.
The work email had one from Eli Morton saying he'd be on his monthly trip to the border Monday before Thanksgiving and asking him to keep an eye on Hermes and let him know (call) if anything he needed to know asap.
The personal business emails had the usual notifications for the house bills on autopay charged to his credit card. Another was from Vanguard Brokerage with the attached monthly statement on his investments. The bottom line showed a balance of $128,410.65 from several stock and mutual fund holdings. The percent change (+/-) showed an average return (+) of 0.85%.
Fuck! he mumbled, thinking, talking to himself: Maybe you'd do better if you put it all in Share Certificates, huh? Where you could make at least one point something percent annual return.
Next he turned to a small plastic tray, a repository, where he kept 'live' papers like taxes due, if any, bills not on autopay, charity donations, personal notes and reminders. He dug into the tray and found nothing he needed to do at present but… at the bottom of several charity envelopes, he found two Powerball tickets he had completely forgotten. Looking at the date, he remembered them as the ones he bought at a Seven Eleven next to the gas station where he gassed up coming home from his sister's place in Arlington a few weeks ago.
Every time he checked the tickets against the drawing, he went through the routine of mixed skepticism (big fat chance, ha! ha!), an undercurrent of some mild excitement at the thought of 'maybe this time', followed by the anticipation of tearing the tickets and discarding the tiny pieces in the trash can and telling himself once again: You're wasting your money, dummy!
He googled the winning number for the drawing date in the tickets. Saturday, October 15. A month ago. The numbers popped up in a website with the jackpot amount of $745 million. He also googled how long tickets were good for and learned 'Winning tickets must be claimed 182 days after drawing (6 months)'. Now he checked one of the two tickets against the winner, one number at a time. The Powerball number last. Not a single number matched. Fuckit! He tore it to pieces and trashed it in the can under the desk. Another two bucks in the trash can, he thought.
He checked the other ticket, this time resigned to the idea of wasting another two bucks. The first five numbers matched! Now he felt glued to his seat as it dawned on him that he just won a million U.S. dollars.
Holy shit! The hell just happened here?
He closed his eyes for the Powerball number. When he opened them, the number he was looking at on the screen was the same as that in his ticket!
Holy sh…whadda hell!
He blinked his eyes several times, unbelieving, for several long seconds, not fully convinced, not trusting his eyes, his wakefulness. He's not fully awake. He's just coming out of a dream!
He slapped himself a couple times left and right. No, he's not coming out of a dream. He's awake. Fully awake. And he's not drunk. He picked up the half-full bottle of Gatorade on the desk and downed it all. Yes, he's fully awake.
And he is now $745 million rich! Then he felt his lips numbing, his ears buzzing, his breathing slowed. When he fully came to his senses after ten, fifteen minutes catching his breath, traversing the living, dining and work room floors, he started thinking, not fully aware that he was actually talking to himself.
“What the hell am I going to do now? What am I going to do with all that money?”
It would take him the rest of the night and the whole day next day before he settled down mentally, emotionally and started the rationale of figuring out what to do with his good fortune and, along that vein, the answer, or an answer, to the question he and Nick had been tossing around between them or by themselves, which was basically:
What to do next? A question which now really boiled down to 'what to do with the rest of his life?'.
Late in the evening after a Hungryman Classic Fried Chicken TV dinner which he chewed on slowly and pushed down with a Cerveza Modelo, he started breaking down what constituted his life at this point of his existence on earth: the people in it, past and present, what he valued in life, his wishes, his desires, what he would like to change, what hurt (him) to see in people's lives, what he wished he could do to fix them, what he could do now to give more purpose for and meaning to his life, not just for himself but for others. Many others: his sister Ellen and her child, Carolyn's brother Edward and his family, the hungry children in Africa and all over, people dying of thirst, the lonely elderly, the poor, the forgotten, etc.
He went to bed past midnight mulling all these stuff with the realization that he was now going to live, starting the next day, free of all the concerns for the material needs of life and that he must find a way to spend the rest of his days for all the good that $745 million could do not only for himself—but for others. Yes, he thought as he drifted slowly to sleep, the hungry as he just saw in those charity solicitations, the thirsty, the elderly, the under-privileged, the neglected, the economically oppressed.