Chocolate Bars and Lottery Tickets

My dad used to buy a lottery ticket every now and then. Just a little scratch ticket. Just for fun. Not very often.

You scratch off the silver wax, hoping to match up three of the same number. He'd scratch off one of them, then wait. A long time. All afternoon. He'd set the ticket down and then dream about what he was going to do with his five thousand dollars. Maybe after dinner he'd scratch off another one, set it down again, and cherish the possibilities for the rest of the evening. He'd reveal the last of the numbers in the evening, at bed time, having squeezed a good 6 hours of happy thoughts out of it. He explained that he never expected to win anything and didn't real care if he did or not, but he enjoyed daydreaming about the possibilities.

On a somewhat related note, Dad could also make a Hershey bar last a full week, storing it in his sock drawer next to his little Native-American-made basket full of tie tacks and the little box of bullets for his never-been-fired .38 special. He'd break off one little square of chocolate at a time, right along the provided score lines, re-wrap the remainder in the silver foil packaging (which he had opened very neatly and non-destructively), slide that back into the paper sleeve, and place it back in amongst the socks and bullets, looking very much like it had never been opened at all. I bet that sock drawer is still organized exactly the same right now. I'm going to go look next chance I get.

As a kid it would kill me. At the store he'd get two chocolate bars, one for each of us, and soundly ignore them both for the entire 2-mile drive from town back to the house. It was everything I could do to be patient and not devour mine as soon as we got in the truck. I could sense them right through the paper grocery bag. Like Superman with X-ray vision. I could see them sitting in there. I could feel them, bouncing and jostling with every bump of the truck. But I waited. Because that's what dad did. He never said that I should, or explained why he did. That's just what you did. That's one tradition I have not been able to uphold.