What’s on my mind? A thousand things.
We visited a craft fair two weeks ago - by far the biggest event of its kind in our village. Somewhere - in some newspaper, on some radio show, in some program of events - I’d read or heard that the craft fair had thousands of different items for sale. Or was it prizes? Or was it prize money? I really couldn’t remember, but the word “thousands” lodged in my brain the way a grain of rice sticks to the bottom of the bag and won’t come loose.
I never win prizes, mostly because I never enter contests. No lucky-number lottery tickets, no draw prizes, no beauty prizes (Du-u-h! That’s a given) … No worries!
You know where this is going, of course. I won the door prize.
I was about to give a crafter $15 for something I couldn’t live without when I heard my name boom from the stage. As the two or three neurons in my brain bounced around like ping-pong balls, I instantly deduced I’d won. A sound I’d never heard before escaped my wide-open mouth:
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!! EEEEK! EEEEK! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!”
“Nicole Parton appears to be in the room,” came the blasé voice over the mic.
Running toward the stage like a linebacker, I was unable to control myself: “EEEEK! EEEEK! EEEEK! I’ve won! I’ve won! I’ve won a thousand dollars!!!”
A puzzled look passed over the face of the woman with the mic.
Instead of a demure and modest “Thank you …” my first words were: “Where’s my thousand dollars?” Puzzlement passed over the faces of everyone in the auditorium. A mental case had won the draw.
“There is no thousand dollars,” the woman with the mic whispered into my ear.
The faces of the other two winners (the other two winners???) were stamped with annoyance. Their names had been called before mine; they’d been patiently waiting as I clambered onto the stage.
I hit that stage with such loud enthusiasm that the woman holding the mic lied: “Because Nicole Parton reached the stage first (the other women’s faces twitched with rage), Nicole will have the first pick of the prizes!” (They hated me; I knew it; I didn’t care).
“What’s it going to be, Nicole? Something from the knitting table, or the jewelry table, or the mmfff-mmfff table (I had no idea which table that was; I wasn’t interested and had blanked it out).
“Knitting!” I yelled. I’d been lusting after one of those fancy ponchos at the knitting table. The other two winners glared at me.
The woman with the mic lead me to the knitting table, at which point the knitter lead me to a small table at the rear. She said I could have “one knitted item from this table.” Everything there was five bucks.
There were no ponchos on that table. There was nothing worth a thousand dollars. I fingered something I liked on a different table, but it was $15.
With my disappointment palpable, the knitter said of the $15 item: “Do you want it, dear? Do you really, really want it?” No, dammit, I wanted the poncho, but instead sniffed: “Yeth.”
“Then go ahead and (sigh) have it. It’s yours.”
I’d prefer not to tell you what “it” was, because I immediately regifted it to a friend who just might read this - even though what she probably wanted was an expensive knitted poncho.
© Nicole Parton, 2019
