Give me $10 on 2-0-0-7 -- and box it

Appeared Jan. 1, 2007

I am the Grinch of New Year's Eve.
My dashing husband likes nothing better than to don a tuxedo and trip the light fantastic.
Me? I bah-humbug my way through the balloons and the confetti and especially through Auld Lang Syne.
I don't understand what a person is supposed to be feeling when the ball drops?
Is it hope for a new beginning? A clean slate? A fresh start?
To me, it signals lost hopes and dreams, the beginning of the end.
How grinch-like is that?
I don't even like to think about the fact that it's New Year's.
One of my brothers called about noon yesterday to see what we were doing for the big night.
“I don't know,” I said. “We were thinking about going to a movie. Why?”
“I was thinking we could get together,” he said.
“There is a catch, though,” he added.
Gulp.
“We have kids,” he said.
Kids? On New Year's Eve?
Double-gulp.
Oh, well. Maybe that's not so bad. After all, how can one get all melancholy and depressed about lost hopes and dreams when there are kids around?
There will be much more important things to fret about - like, say, cheese dip spilling all over the pool table.
I Googled “New Year's depression” and one of the pieces of advice I found (right after “don't have such high expectations”) is “live in the present, live for today.”
And there is nothing like small children to get you front and center in “today.”
My sons are much older than most of their cousins because I'm the oldest of five kids.
I often wonder what those young cousins think of Aunt Pat. They probably look at me as that eccentric, oddball aunt. You know the type. Every family has one.
Sometimes when I see the little darlings, I think that maybe I could be more involved with them, take them shopping, have them for sleepovers. But, alas, that thought is fleeting.
I do have a New Year's wish, however. And I'm sincere about it. (Hey, even the Grinch showed he had a little bit of heart.)
I wish that all those people who play the lottery at the gas station would win.
Yeah, it's aggravating when the line winds around to the back of the store because all the people in front of me are reciting their Lotto numbers to the clerk or are buying those scratch-and-wins.
But I really, truly wish they would win - and win big.
Last week, at a gas station in downtown Elyria, the woman in front of me bought $15 worth of assorted tickets and then right before she walked away from the counter, said to the clerk, “Give me $5 on Number 3.”
She bought $5 worth of gas that cost $2.29 a gallon presumably because that was all the money she had left after her lottery purchases.
Hmmm. That amount of gas might get her to Lorain and back.
But she probably didn't even think of that. She was too busy dreaming of winning the lottery.
A Harvard University student named Emily Oster did her senior honors thesis a few years ago on “Dreaming big: Why do people play the Powerball?”
She concluded that it was for fun and entertainment and even though critics suggest lotteries take advantage of people, they actually set up a win-win situation.
States get money for worthwhile things such as education while consumers get a chance to have fun and dream big.
And what's so bad about that? Because if life is, as I suspect, a lot of looking back on lost hopes and dreams, those dreams might as well be big ones.
Right?