Golden Eggs and Other Deadly Things

THE CREAM-COLORED ENVELOPE was crammed into my mailbox along with three bills, four solicitations, my professional biofeedback magazine, a sale notice from Loehmann's, and the Public Television Sweepstakes offer. No checks. I tossed the bills onto my desk, dropped the magazine, the ad, and the letter onto the coffee table, dumped two of the solicitations, and put the worthiest causes in a basket to be considered when I win the sweepstakes. Then I opened the sweepstakes offer. Notice I said when I win, not if. Recently, my mind-set regarding easy money has undergone a major transformation. Never again will I carelessly toss one of those fat envelopes into the trash, and every week I blow a buck or two on a lottery ticket. Don't get me wrong. I'm selective. I don't buy into the come-ons (public television being the rare exception), but I diligently fill out the forms and stick the stick-ers on every ticket that's delivered to my Norwood, New Jersey, home. Not because I'm a candidate for Gamblers' Anonymous, nor have I turned into one of those gullible sweepstakes addicts currently making news, but because, just occasionally, the gods smile and miracles happen. I'm personally acquainted with someone to whom one did. My dad. It wasn't one of the Massachusetts lottery's biggest pots, but it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for him. Despite gifting me and my children with ten thousand each and curing my insomnia by setting up trusts for their college educations, the windfall has allowed him all sorts of luxuries heretofore out of his reach. At the time it caused quite a stir up in Worcester, where he and his wife live. The kids and I drove up for the celebration. All our pictures were in the papers, we were interviewed on television, and we were wined and dined by the mayor, who threw a gala bash in Dad's honor. It may sound prejudiced coming from me, but it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. David Carlin may well be the last of a breed fast becoming extinct. A truly honest human being. A big gentle bear. Like the panda. He brought me up from the age of three without the help of a wife or nanny, on a diet of love and old-fashioned aphorisms, maxims by which he continues to live. Do unto others, A stitch in time, Don't judge a book by its cover, and so on. He was never big on the one about sparing the rod and spoiling the child, so I had a pretty happy childhood. It's only since he married Eve--a sixtyish-plus lady whose taste tends to run to pointy bras a la Monroe and skintight sweaters welded onto a body that's more Roseanne than Marilyn--that the last one, that one about the book cover, has been giving me trouble. Admittedly, my reaction to her has been colored by her habit of thrusting her more than ample bosom, like a giant mother hen, between my father and me in a well-intentioned effort to keep his heart pumping. Also by what I perceive as her minimally disguised disapproval of me. To be honest, I'm not totally free of blame for this. The conclusions she's drawn have a certain validity when you consider that she and my father had been married only a few years when it was trumpeted all over the media that I was the prime suspect in the murder of my husband's mistress. Granted, I'd committed that particular murder in my head numerous times, but it was more in the way Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart. Anyway, I am only five foot three, weighing a hundred and twelve pounds; as a divorcee I'm raising, pretty much single-handedly, two adolescent kids, Matthew, age eleven, and Alison, thirteen; and I'm a mental-health professional, a biofeedback clinician, whose job it is to teach people how to cope with the more stressful times in their lives without developing holes in their guts or taking a flying leap off the nearest bridge. You'd think it would've crossed her mind that this was hardly the profile of a modern Lucretia Borgia. My dad's been my hero and myTesler, Nancy is the author of 'Golden Eggs and Other Deadly Things' with ISBN 9780440226154 and ISBN 0440226155.