"The Lottery Winner" (excerpt #1)

In order to tell this story, we should probably start with the superficial. Squinting quickly at his physical stats, Michael Green is a man who may quickly be categorized as one entirely average person. He is of the “official” standard American male height at 5’ 8,” yet if any of you have male friends of the 5’ 8” variety, you’re well aware that these men spend their whole adult lives battling perceptions that they are indeed short. Michael’s thirty-year-old frame could efficiently be cataloged and filed away as neither solid nor soft, but somewhere in that strange grey area in-between. From afar, perhaps eying him from across a rather wide street for instance, you might be tempted to classify Michael as somewhat scrawny. However, a closer view of Michael’s mid-frame would reveal two rather healthy love handles which would rule out any type of slenderness.

Nature gave Michael dark features at birth, but not in the tall-dark-handsome-Cary-Grant-Clooney sort of way. His brown eyes, bold eyebrows and deep black locks simply serve to clash mightily with the pallor of his pasty skin. As for fashion, Michael prefers dark-colored workman-like pants (a.k.a “Dickies”) and the kind of short-sleeved “cowboy” shirts that refuse to wrinkle no matter how carelessly they are crumpled on a floor. (For a multitude of reasons mostly having to do with impatience, Michael never could master folding, hanging or ironing.) Michael always wears sneakers and black socks.

It should also be mentioned that the way Michael tends to relax his face makes it appear to the outsider that he is deeply annoyed at something or somebody, perhaps even them. This often leads to miscommunication and unwanted judgments upon his character. Mostly, it just means he’s tired.

Michael is pretty decent at many things – typing, reading while walking, Frisbee, being one of the first to finish any type of timed test - but he’s not particularly great at anything. If he were a university instead of a person, he’d be a nice-enough liberal arts college nestled somewhere between Indiana and Iowa, the kind that would throw in a no-nonsense name-brand PC for free upon admission. Michael has never truly mastered any skill and has no area of superior expertise. The closest he came to the top was one week in 1989 where he was widely considered to be the best bell boy in the ‘Handbellers for Him’ church choir.

So, superficially speaking of course, you could safely say Michael Green is just another average human being in the expansive sea of genetic mediocrity.

But unlike 99.998% of most men, Michael Gregory Green is a lottery winner. A big time lottery winner. Five years ago this May, Michael won the single largest lottery pay-out in New York state’s history; $248 million dollars.

What follows is the story of one remarkable event that happened to one pretty unremarkable guy. It’s a tale about what happened to a lottery winner after the press conferences and the novelty check presentations and the rounds of the local news networks ended. Oh, and just as a warning, Michael doesn’t drink, snort, shoot, or gamble all of his money away. That’s another kind of story. (Sorry for the disappointment, as those stories tend to be pretty exciting.)

For those of you still remaining for this story, let’s go ahead and take it back to two days before Michael became very, very rich.