Free Orwell's Luck by Richard W. Jennings Page A

father said.
    "You mean," I continued in my astonishment, "the house across the street, the one with the FOR SALE sign?"
    "That's the one," my mother said. "You can hardly blame them for wanting to move, now that they're rich and all."
    "Why should he turn out to be the one who gets rich?" my father lamented. "Of all the dumb luck! So close and yet so far!"
    I couldn't stop asking the same question over and over. "Those people? That house? That driveway? The one you would come to next if you were driving down the street to our house in a car, or a school bus, or on a bicycle, or in A NEWSPAPER TRUCK?!!"
    "What are you talking about?" my father said. "The house right over there. The one with the rusted tricycle in the bushes."
    "Maybe I should bake them something," my mother said.
    "I doubt they're hungry," my father responded. "Besides, they're leaving."
    "Yeah," I said, "with my money."
    "I'm sure everyone feels they should have won," comforted my mother.
    I went to my room to complain to Orwell about being skunked again by fate. Obviously, the people across the street had wound up with a newspaper intended for me. Orwell must have put the winning numbers in my horoscope before he went in for his operation, not knowing that my father had just canceled our subscription.
    Rats, rats, and double rats! What good was luck if it kept missing you all the time?

The meaning of money
    Sitting in my room with Orwell, agitated about the loot landing at the wrong house, I eventually recalled the rabbit's recent dream suggestion to try to see things in a different light. And so, with reluctant effort, I forced a revised theory to percolate in my brain.
    What if what was happening wasn't events going haywire? What if what was happening was happening according to plan? What if I was never supposed to get the money? What if Orwell never walked again?
    Nature thrives on change. But is all change merely random? Just because something is unpredictable doesn't mean it's an accident. Just because we can't figure out a pattern doesn't mean it happened by chance.
    Everything keeps changing all the time—dreams, weather, neighbors. And I had heard, possibly in church, that nothing changes everything like money does. I had even heard it said that sudden money can make you worse off than you were before you had it, but how this could be true, I couldn't see.
    I thought about a conversation I'd had with my father, not so very long before, when together we'd dragged our after-Christmas trash bags to the curb.
    "Look at that!" my father said.
    "Look at what?" I replied.
    "Look how many trash bags we've put out on the curb."
    "There's a lot," I observed.
    "Look up and down the street," he continued. "Did you happen to notice that we have more trash bags out here than anybody else in the neighborhood?"
    I hadn't noticed, but it was true. We had a handsome little mountain of them.
    "Do you know what this means?" my father asked, but I didn't, so he told me, as I knew he would. "It means that you and your sister got more things for Christmas than anyone else in the neighborhood, that's what it means."
    "Oh," I said.
    "It means," he concluded, "that you and your sister should be very grateful."
    But to tell the truth, I wasn't. I was glad when I got the presents, of course. Who wouldn't be? But by the time my father and I'd tossed those trash bags on the curb, the happy holiday feeling the presents brought was long gone.
    I'd much rather have Orwell hopping and healthy and hanging around than a whole roomful of store-bought presents. I looked at him. He nibbled politely on a carrot. Orwell was starting to get a real bedridden look. His hair was a mess. I rummaged around in a desk drawer and found an old doll hairbrush that I never use anymore, part of a set I'd gotten for Christmas when I was my sister's age.
    I lifted Orwell out of the cage ever so carefully and set him in my lap.
    I have no idea what happened to the doll, but I can still remember