The Treasure Unfounded

     When I first saw this scrip of money, I knew I had found it.
     Fifty million anythings, I reasoned, had to be a lot of something.  I had no idea what deutschmarks were worth back in the day or even here and now, but even a dime multiplied enough was a treasure worth finding.
     It only took a little research to realize that in the hyperinflation before the war, this note would buy nothing more than a loaf of bread.  In fact, it was so mundane that it was even below the interest of collectors of such ephemera.  Believe me, I checked.
     But I should have known…it looked cheap with its flat color ink on thin paper and printed only on one side.  Not worth the printing it was papered on.  So much for my oytser.
     But then I turned it over.

     On the back someone had written six numbers.  As fate would have it, that was the same number of numbers they used in the state lottery.  I probably should not reproduce them here for danger of hurting someone else with my numb.  Needless to say, I could not get rid of the feeling that these six were the very treasure, the oytser, I had been searching for.  The unlock of my trap and the gaping gateway to my future.
     It came just in the nick too.
     I knew by the time I found those numbers that I would never be what I hoped.  Never be rich or famous, never special or notable.  I was an ordinary guy living the staple life, never winning big, never soaring, but having to settle for a series of tiny gains.  A break on the price of oatmeal; a car collision narrowly missed.  A compliment here or there.  I was a mix of deep needs and shallow talents which means that I was a sad case, but not a tragic one, and to no one on the face of the earth but myself.

     Yet here were six numbers that could change all that.  Magically delivered to me by heirmail.  Here finally was my chance to buy that condo, hire that cook, shine those shoes and tell everyone everywhere to go fuck themselves because I was rich and did not have to listen or follow or yessir-nosir anymore.
     Yes, here was my beshert, my fate, written by someone with a tiny hand on the back of an old piece of German money.  Perhaps even by an ancestor of mine looking out for me through the hand-me-downs of the generations.
     In other words, not just mere luck but fate itself.  The inevitable.  What had to be.  Like the joke that Hitler would always have to die on a Jewish holiday.  Why?  Because any day he died would have been a Jewish holiday.

     And so, like a midwife to a misconception, I played those numbers in the lottery for months.  Played and played them and never to any avail.  I can’t say that I was surprised.  Even going in, I knew this was pointless.  Like banging a pan in a pandemonium; one more thump in a callithump.  In other words, it was a tired cliché simply because it was a dream everyone dreamed but always woke up from empty-headed.  After all, everyone wanted the same thing, the same triumph, the same freedom.  It was all so familiar in a depressing sort of way.

     That was when I recalled something my Aunt Ethel once told me.  That although beshert meant destiny in Yiddish, it was not always desirable.  Beshert was not what you wanted to happen, it was what inevitably happened.  In the way that Yiddish was a shorthand for both angels and worms, beshert was not necessarily a good thing.  Not a bad thing either.  Maybe neither.  Probably both.
     My aunt was a gambler herself and had once won a thousand dollars in a craps game and got so excited that she crunched her teeth and cracked a crown, then had to fork the money over to a dentist who just so happened to be sitting across the table and had just lost the money to her.
     Beshert. 
     And let us pass by delicately the tragic possibilities herein.
     You never know when your triumph will be your undoing….or vice versa.  You never know what to hope for.  That was the lesson on that note.  Have you ever heard the expression that you often cannot tell the difference between fate and the smell of a dead rat?
     No, I haven't either but I wonder why not.

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