FOR SOME TIME, I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THE MILLIONS I LOST. This financial loss was not the result of a Ponzi scheme, or another poor investment choice, neither was I sucked into an overseas email phishing scam. Rather, it was potentially, a huge loss, but a loss in many ways. As any reasonable person would, I concede that there is a possibility the prize could have simply been a free ticket, but I know that I lost my shot at financial freedom. Even a free ticket would have been a financial loss because it easily could have turned into something more, something greater: my fortune.

Over the years, I must have asked myself this a thousand times, and as Sheila Heti reminded us in her Trampoline Hall lecture Why Go Out? we must search for answers “because a question you ask yourself a thousand times eventually deserves to be answered.”

For those of us who think on the page: If it is worth thinking about, it is worth writing about. Let’s call it writing a wrong.

The day began as any other workday did: breakfast, GO commute downtown, herded through PATH concourse, into the bowels of the financial district, specifically the office building in which I attended meetings and wrote stuff down. On the day my fortune was appropriated, I modified my routine only enough to pause at lottery retailer’s kiosk to check my winning ticket. This errand was a mistake. It was a mistake that would cost me a windfall of cash, and the financial freedom to write my best-selling novel.

Allow me to stop for a moment and share some inside information. It has been my experience that writers have keen insight. The established writers have time to ponder, to noodle, to think. They also study human beings—some formally, most practically—in their various habitats: on sidewalks, in pubs, at the office, gymnastics class, in social situations where the writer has not had too much to drink, which I fear, may be infrequent. Writers are artists, artists feel, intuition based on feeling, and writers are generally aligned with their intuition. That’s enough for now; I do not wish to reveal much more without further discussion.

Can property freely given to another be considered stolen, if it’s not returned? I think about this, too, my complicity in the exchange of my luck, his good fortune.

So a few years later, I learned by I had been struggling to write part-time while working full-time instead of nurturing my gift when on October 25, 2006, CTV’s W5 aired an episode entitled Luck of the Draw, which was “the story of Bob Edmonds and how he was cheated out of a winning lottery ticket by a convenience store clerk.” Oh boy, this had a familiar ring. Finally, the retailer’s actions, which had been a mystery to me, suddenly became clear. It was not been an overactive imagination after all, but an acute, intuitive read. It was oddly satisfying to know this, to put the retailer’s abrupt end to our transaction down to theft, rather than dismissal of me as a customer. I could rationalize his rude behaviour, ill manners, and poor customer service, but the truth is that I knew, I knew, something was shady. I felt it. I just never understood why.

At the time, I felt the impulse to hail security to force the retailer to return my ticket, but I felt powerless. And confused, I suppose. I may have been sure that I had turned in a winning ticket, but the machine and the retailer told me I did not win. Without my ticket in-hand, I did not know the numbers, and without the numbers, I had to accept the situation. Maybe he had a right to refuse. It did not matter in the end. He bullied me, and I felt it. In this luck of the draw, I had been beat. I simply walked away.

After hearing Bob Edmonds, things started to make sense, and it soured me on lotteries these fraudulent practices by the very people who profited from selling me tickets. Did I buy tickets expecting to win? Well, yes, actually.

I know what it’s like to sit in the “Winner’s Circle” at the OLG offices in Toronto. My fiancé and I did that in April 1995 when we collected $29,272—second prize—on a ticket I bought on a whim, which is simply another form of intuition disguised.

Although you will not find me at the roulette wheel of a casino, or at slot machines, and you would never (ever!) see me at a poker table (the strategy of and mathematics required in card games is beyond the functionality of my brain), I do understand the excitement of gambling, and the promise of winning, especially after winning, is invigorating. I suppose that you could apply the label “addictive” to the joy associated with it, if you were so inclined to label such things.

…continued