Several weeks ago, I attended my son Kiet's wrestling banquet where I happened to sit at the same table with a parent I met for the first time whose son was a friend of Kiet's and a varsity wrestler on the team. During the long and tedious awards ceremony, we'd struck up an intimate conversation to escape boredom. She was very easy to talk to and we discussed everything under the sun, including the economy, her relationship with her son, whom I shall call Lee, and the situation with her ex – Lee’s dad – whom I’m not acquainted with but catch a glimpse of sometimes as we both arrive at school to pick up the boys from wrestling practice.
On the subject of the economy, I discovered it hadn't been exactly kind on Lee's mom. She confided in me that she had lost roughly $3 million in the last few years – some due to bad investments and a bigger part dissipated in business ventures that had seemed promising at the time, but eventually took the same steep downward slide of the general economy. By now she has liquidated all her businesses except for a nail shop and a yogurt store. While married, this woman was the successful owner of a sewing factory and a tanning salon, as well as the generous benefactor of many friends and relatives who had depended on her to provide start-up loans for their own businesses. In fact, even after they were divorced, she had lent her ex a big sum of money in his time of need with the stipulation that he played safe with what's left of their son's once robust inheritance. Predictably, her ex couldn't do better and was only able to repay her roughly $20K. She seemed pretty understanding, recounting to me in an even tone that she mostly believed he was truthful about his financial disarray, except for a few uncomfortable moments when she'd wondered if he had in fact spent part of the money on courting and wedding his second wife, a beauty queen from Vietnam who purportedly dropped him after she had achieved her desired immigration status and he was no longer wealthy. This scenario seems to be a recurrent theme with many of the divorced Vietnamese men I know. In fact, I'd ceased to be surprised by the commonness of this cliché.
Anyhow, it had struck me as total madness to contemplate losing $3 million. I've experienced my own humbling financial circumstances, but really couldn't fathom such a nerve-racking downfall. Firstly, I never had $3 million to begin with, but even if I did, I imagine I would hang on to it for dear life as I'm so leery of investments in general that I tend to stay away from them so I could sleep at night. The truth is I'm so averse to risk taking that there was no way I could have built up that kind of fortune anyway.
There's a French song saucily done by Petula Clark in the sixties whose lyrics included the following verse: "Tout le monde veut aller au ciel, oui, mais personne ne veut mourir!" (Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die.) Seems to me everyone wants to win the lottery, and most wouldn't actually balk at having to first buy tickets, except me. Notwithstanding my spendthrift ways, I tend to view lottery tickets as a terrible waste of money. Additionally, I secretly feel I don't deserve to win! All things considered, I see myself as being pretty fortunate in life, so I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of coveting more, as if I could will a better balance of cosmic fairness by refusing to allow myself the distant possibility of becoming the next jackpot winner. My ex, however, was disdainful of lottery tickets for an entirely different reason. He would sometimes buy them, but never bother to check lottery results if he heard someone else had already won the big prize. To him it just wasn't worth the trouble to win anything less. That would defeat the whole purpose of winning the lottery as he saw it, if he still had to get up every morning and go to work!
You might wonder why I'd been going on about the lottery after my tangent discourse on the sad state of the economy. The entire previous paragraph became somewhat relevant to this blog only because my mom has been exhorting me to purchase lottery tickets lately, a request I'd repeatedly ignored... because she thought it might be my time to win big! I don't remember mentioning this in any of my writings, but my mom is quite superstitious. Furthermore, she believes in the premonitory power of dreams, which was why she got more than a little excited when I shared with her about my recent dream involving water... lots of it! In my mom's book, water (in a dream) equates with money. I've no idea how she came about that assertion as I'm not well-versed on the interpretation of dreams, but supposedly my mom had once guided someone in the family to win a small purse in a game of chance after that person dreamed about water. My dream, however, seemed to approach a nightmare and hardly propitious, at least in the beginning! I saw myself arriving at a seaside vacation home with my entire extended family, where everybody was happily cavorting on the beach except me, who for some reason stupidly went inside to check out the bathroom where there was a storm drain next to the sink. Don't ask me why a storm drain would be located beside a bathroom sink, as most dreams tend to be rather peculiar in their own unique ways. Anyhow, in my dream I never once wondered about the purpose of the storm drain, but was curious enough about it that I'd lifted the metal lid that covered its opening. I saw, or thought I spied, a huge snake inside with its pointy head peeking out at me ominously.
So I screamed and ran outside for help. My brother Louie came in carrying a wood branch, with my sister Peni following gingerly at a distance, admonishing him to be careful. When Louie lifted the storm drain cover and poked at the creature, it slid out in one tremendous whoosh and flattened itself into a humongous fish... a giant Manta ray that had the bad luck to get caught in the storm drain that rendered it the shape of a widely-hated reptile.
The Manta ray wriggled wildly on the tiled bathroom floor and found its way back to the ocean as our family ooh'ed and ahh'ed over its majestic appearance. My dream had this corny ending not unlike the Japanese monster movies of my youth, in which a certain helpful and victorious beast would conveniently wade out to sea, never to be seen again once it had vanquished Godzilla to save Tokyo and its people from further destruction.
The point of my persistent rambling was that my mom somehow had become totally convinced my dream could forecast a financial windfall for me, despite the fact that I've been working a regular job, with absolutely no chance of making it big on my own because I would never dare to take a stab at any business opportunity that presented itself. To her, the idea that a snake (in her mind an extremely vile and unredeemable animal) would transform itself into benign sea life, and my having "rescued" the trapped creature by causing it to be released to sea, signified something wholly auspicious! And let's not forget about all that water in the ocean. Water means money, remember?
I heard someone had already won the California lottery jackpot on March 25th, so I'll definitely wait for the purse to get big again before literally following my dream of riches.
My mom the fortune-teller and my Sis, Midol
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