If you're reading this, it's because you've come to enjoy my father's style of writing. You clicked on that familiar link with confidence that you would read some recent experience of his that would, at the very least, give an amusing boost to your day. You know what's coming, as soon as the page loads up. An experience that most of us would either never take note of, or one that would be frustrating beyond the bounds of humor, or perhaps, if we admit it, something that stands outside the edges of our maps. The kind of something that we have not the wisdom to apprehend without the sagacious insights of another to render it down to our level of comprehension. And somehow, he takes any one of those kinds of experiences and lets the rest of us in on the joke in a way that makes it anecdotal yet profound.
So, if you're reading this...because you've come to enjoy my father's style of writing...and clicked on that familiar link with confidence that you would get something like what I described above, then you should stop reading. This won't be anything like that. In fact, I'm not sure what it will be. Consider this your disclaimer, your warning label, your “get out of jail free” card, your tax/tag&title statement, and your all-purpose “you can't sue me” notice. If you're just painfully bored, then this may be for you.
Let me help you get to know me better by introducing you to the two men who are the very banes of my existence. These are not figurative men. They are not allegorical. They are flesh and bone, with distinctive personalities and very real capacities for vexation.
The first man is an arrogant idiot. Now, we all suffer people who are one or the other, which is to say, either an arrogant person or an idiotic one. But how the deuce does somebody carry on in life as both? All the time? For over thirty years? I could go on, but this isn't the man I'm dwelling on today.
Today my bitterness broods on the other man. The one who is arrogant, rightfully so, and not an idiot. His name is Bootsy, and he is a multi-millionaire.
Please hear me on this point. I am not bitter about the fact that he is filthy-stinking rich. I think that wealth can be a tremendous blessing or a terrible curse, depending on the owner. I also believe that part of kingdom expansion for the Christian is becoming the kind of person who is capable of governing the world's resources. Oftentimes, that means becoming rich in the process.
No, I'm bitter about the lucrative, luxurious, lackadaisical ease with which the man makes money. In fact, he doesn't even have to make money anymore. It just finds him. When Bootsy walks down the street he makes a point not to walk with his hands in his pockets, so that money can just jump right into them as he passes by. His money-achieving feats have become the stuff of mythologies. He has it coming out the wazoo. He also has a magnetized horseshoe up the wazoo that is attracting money even in his sleep. You think I'm kidding.
Here's a summary of his most recent trip to Vegas, representing one of many throughout the year. Flash forward to the end of the story: Bootsy returns to little ol' Lynchburg, VA with a brick of $100 bills, stacking up to $47,000 – glad to show it off. Back to the beginning: Bootsy is playing slots. Slots! There is no skill set involved in slots like there might be in any variation of cards, roulette, or dice. With slots, monkey feeds coin, monkey pulls lever, monkey waits for pictures. Over and over again. Well, Bootsy is a winning monkey, and he doesn't have to pull the lever much.
Legend has it that he plays one machine for about an hour, spending roughly a hundred bucks. Bootsy can smell it coming. The wazoo horseshoe is pinging. The machine hits. Four thousand dollars! When the machine lands that kind of money, an attendant comes by to verify everything and then give the man his money. While Bootsy is waiting for the vested man to do his work, he reaches over and plays the machine next to him, just to pass the time. One pull. Another four thousand bucks!
Not a bad take, but he is nowhere near done. This is Bootsy we're talking about. That night, asleep in a swanky room at the Vegas casino hotel, Bootsy wakes up from a dream about a particular slot machine. He rushes to get himself just-barely-decent-enough, which amounts to his robe and slippers, dashes down to the game floor, feeds the machine he just dreamed about, pulls the lever and makes another whopping sixteen thousand dollars. I'm sorry. I ran out of exclamation marks on the last slot machine.
So far we've only accounted for roughly half his winnings that week. I have at least a hundred other such stories, in enterprises and gambles far away from Vegas. You may have heard the saying “money finds money.” Well, that adage is incorrect. Money finds Bootsy. He is the possessor of the wazoo horseshoe. And he has my envy.
However, I wonder a lot about Bootsy's motivations in life and living, and whether he is truly happy. On better days, I take stock of the blessings in my own life that are difficult to estimate monetarily. Here's a few.
My greatest blessing has to be my wife. A man never makes a greater decision than who he marries, in so doing, deciding a lot of who he will become through and with that person. In her, I have a person who is strangely capable of suffering all of my freakishness, and somehow wandering through the whole complex labyrinth that makes up who I am. Adena and I have managed to create four miniatures in five years. Obviously, the bedroom is in good order.
And the miniatures are glad to see me when I come home at the end of a long day roofing. The boys like to wrestle. The girls like to hug. They all love to laugh. They also forgive, as I'm still learning how to be a parent, continuing to make mistakes or just plain sinning against them as they suffer the consequences of my fallen-ness.
Their grandparents and great-grandparents love them greatly, and do a lot of our job for us, providing for them all they could want or need. They do it for us, too, still refusing to let us completely “grow up,” out of reach of their loving provision.
All in all, I'd say life is pretty good. We may struggle some months to pay for the groceries, a pain Bootsy forgot about a long time ago. Even so, aside from the money problems, or the frustration with the incompetence of my superiors, or the philosophical angst that drives a lot of my life, I think that I have recently discovered a little wazoo horseshoe of my own. Because there is no good explanation for how I have been so richly and undeservedly loved.
And that is what makes me the millionaire's envy.
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