Last month Cari heard on the morning news that the Mega Millions lottery jackpot was up to $306 million, and insisted we buy a ticket. I was skeptical at first, but the idea soon grew on me. We’d spent the entire weekend talking finances with her parents, trying to figure out our new tax bracket, the difference between a 401k or 403b, and just how we might ever be able to contribute to these while paying back her student loans and still somehow managing to save up for a house. The lottery was clearly a simpler solution. Well, with the exception of the fact that neither of us had every purchased a lottery ticket. Cari works long hours and commutes, so I got elected to make the big purchase. My initial plan was to forget. I am the kind of person who has walked into a casino only once or twice in my lifetime, promptly lost the $20 I intended to spend, and vowed never to return. I hate losing money just about as much as I asking for favors, and in my opinion, the lottery involved both. To me, there always seemed to be something so naïve and vulnerable about playing the lottery. It’s as if you are presenting yourself to the universe and declaring that you believe you are special, the exception, the chosen one. And then being told your wrong, and your dollar is gone.

Still, unable to gracefully shake the idea, I pulled into the gas station just down the block from my work, drawn by the lottery banners hanging across their door. I got out to check my tire pressure, nonchalantly peeking inside the cashier’s office. But then I was overcome by a wave of distrust. I remembered how much I hate that gas station, with it’s dirt streaked windows and prices 30 cents above those in the nicer parts of Oakland, as if taunting those born on Oakland’s more dangerous streets that they would never get out, not even to buy cheaper gas. I got back into the car and drove on.

Not even five minutes later, a parade of numbers arrived unbidden in my mind. 17 12 37 18. They repeated over and over until I jotted them down on a CD case sitting in my console. With that, I was sold. Convinced. The numbers took hold of me, and for the rest of the day I counted the minutes until I was done with work and could seek out a lottery ticket on which to transcribe them. I even contemplated taking my last client on an outing to a neighborhood gas station to purchase a ticket with her, since we’ve been working on independent living skills. I decided against it though, given that Medi-cal probably isn’t paying for our specialized behavioral services just so we can teach teenagers how to throw their money away.

By the time I was driving home from work, the numbers had all but lost their pull on me, and I made it into our driveway before I remembered my mission. I turned around and drove straight into the local gas station—the friendly, reasonably priced type that can be relied upon to serve its gas affordable, and with a free cup of coffee to boot. “Nope,” the cashier said sympathetically, we don’t sell any lottery tickets here, check down the street at the liquor store.”

As I walked down to the liquor store, I was giddy with optimism and hope. I’m not sure when the transition occurred, but somehow playing the lottery had shifted from an ominous overstepping of my place in the world to a challenge I was convinced I was up to meeting. Four months ago, when we completed our first round of insemination, as terrified that it would work as we were that it wouldn’t, one of the nurses had advised us: “don’t get your hopes up too high, getting pregnant the first time would be like winning the lottery.” Three rounds of IUI’s, countless doctor’s bills and missed days of work, and four $675 teeny, tiny sperm-filled vials later, I was read to be the kind of person who wins the lottery.

I surveyed the scene in the liquor store at 5 pm on a Wednesday. It seems I wasn’t the only one putting more faith in the lottery than in alcohol this evening; the only other man in the store was at the counter selecting a handful of lottery tickets too. “Three for the Super Lotto and five for Mega Millions,” he said casually, handing over his card to the middle aged Asian man behind the counter. My original plan was to purchase three tickets: one for Cari, one for me, and for the baby, but as I watched the man walk off with his tickets, I decided if he had five then I needed five as well. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have equal odds with the man in our neighborhood store, and we’re talking about a national competition here.

“Five for MegaMillions,” I said, mimicking the man’s casual tone, and scoffing internally that he had wasted previous time and money on anything other than the 306 million dollar MegaMillions jackpot. The men behind the counter handed me a sherbet orange ticket with five lines of random numbers printed one it.

“Wait!” I said, as he turned to help the next customer, “I thought I could choose my numbers.”

“You bought a quick pick ticket- the machine chose for you.” This was all wrong. How could we possibly win the lottery without my lucky numbers? The only one of them present on the string of numbers he’d handed me was a lonely number 37… hardly enough to win the jack pot.

“How do I choose my own?” I asked, unusually persistent for someone whose painful youthful shyness usually returns with a vengeance at times like these. He pointed to a small table by the front door, and turned to hand the next customer her ticket. “Tisk, tisk, tisk”, the busy little machine murmured with quiet condescension while spitting out a string of numbers, “step right up and take your chances.”

Meanwhile, at the cluttered table, I held in front of me an intimating red ticket with a sea of numbers floating in little white bubbles. I stared at the lines, willing them to make sense. People do this all the time, I scolded myself, you can figure this out.

While I tried to make sense of the columns of numbers, I was distracted by two pressing thoughts. The first: how living in Alameda County, second only to Queens County in diversity, makes everything more interesting, even purchasing a lottery ticket, because I am constantly faced with the opportunity to discover the common threads among all of our human differences. As I watched, a steady stream of lottery winner hopefuls poured into the store, representing in just a few minutes more diversity of age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status than I witnessed in any given month growing up in Palm Dessert. Some were likely buying the ticket in hopes of buying that second home up in Lake Tahoe, while others were dreams of buying food somewhere other than the neighborhood 7-eleven that week, with something other than their EBT card. All, hopeful.

The second: that my unbidden numbers had materialized two numbers short of the six needed to play a MegaMillions lottery ticket.

My thoughts were interrupted by the man working the liquor store cash register, who had caught a lull in customers and walked over to show me how the ticket worked.

I left the store a few minutes later to the sound of the elderly check out clerk wishing me luck, his kindness in taking a moment to explain the ticket rising up within me to fill the narrow gap just before my ribs meet.

Instead of the three perfect tickets with variations of my numbers that I intended to leave with, I wound up with nine.  Five accidental “quick picks,” and four self selected- one for me, one for Cari, one for the baby, and one extra just in case- because trusting fate is all fine and well in theory, but I’ve always been one for taking matters into my hands.

Next on my agenda was to get busy cultivating the kind of positive energy befitting of someone who was about to win the lottery. I walked the dogs, tidied up the house, and headed to yoga for the first time since we’d moved to the bay area a year and a half ago. If there ever was a time to get zen, this was it. The yoga instructor, a woman in her 20’s with a lyrical, liquid voice and eyes that were somehow simultaneously sympathetic and empowering, instructed us to select a mantra to represent our intention for what we hoped the class would bring us. It was to be two words, one for each breath in and another for each breath out. It seemed crass to select “winning lottery,” even if my breaths would be the only one to hear what I’d selected, so I opted for a veiled approximation instead: “building home”. It seemed open to interpretation, and I hoped that God or whatever universal energies might be listening would be able to gather from it that I wasn’t simply being greedy.

I returned home confident that not only would we win the lottery, but that we would also adjust to our new financial status with the grace and generosity befitting of someone who had been called to fulfill this particular mission. When I arrived I discovered that Cari, also one to take matters into her own hands, had purchased two tickets as well. She’d encountered similar bumps in the unfamiliar process though, and her tickets consisted of one unintentional MegaMillions “quick pick,” and one even more unintentional SuperLotto Plus ticket for a separate drawing the following day. I paced the house while we waited for the 8:00 news to air the results of that day’s highly televised draw, and Cari hit the refresh button repeatedly on the MegaMillions website. We were sharply focused in our attention, unwavering, not unlike how we were in the moments surrounding the dreaded taking of the pregnancy test each month. Weeks of planning and hoping, despairing yet somehow still believing, culminating in three quick minutes of unearthly silence, like the moment you drive your car through an underpass in a rainstorm. Your senses suddenly sharpen, tuning to the unexpected lull in the insistent tapping of the raindrops against your car windshield; simultaneously straining to listen for the moment the sound will resume and yet also disbelieving that it will. With a soft thunk, the curtain of rain envelopes your car again and it is then as if the silence, the anticipation, had never even existed. One line, negative. Sixty numbers, not one single match.

As I drove home from work the next evening, watching the sun drop into the bay and light up San Francisco in a coral blaze, I was flooded with the realization that we had won the lottery after all. Not in a sudden windfall of money, but in the slow, painstaking, halting way forward that is the path most of us follow towards our dreams. A wife and partner of four years, a little house on a quiet street, jobs that are meaningful and pay us enough to survive, two dogs, a cat, and the hope of a baby. To the shy, lonely, teenager I had once been, so terrified by my first crush on a girl that I convinced myself my feelings were just the Holy Spirit calling me to convert her, what I have now is more than I could have ever hoped any lottery win would give me.

The following week, while cleaning off my desk, I came across the forgotten SuperLotto Plus ticket Cari had accidentally purchased when trying to buy a MegaMillions ticket. It’s numbers were a combination of our birthdays and ages. 04 07 22 27 31 02. I opened up my computer to the lottery’s website, and scrolled down to the winning numbers from the week before. Three of the numbers were a match, with a grand total payout of eleven dollars. This unexpected win of eleven dollars, the exact amount of money we had invested in our lottery adventure, seemed to confirm what I had been already been suspecting all week- that what we have is exactly enough.