The mail contained my newest issue of The Writing Bug, a letter from Gladys, and a slim envelope, addressed to me in my own handwriting. In the return address area, the envelope read "Free!! Poetry Contest!!" (also in my handwriting). Remember that contest, the one I entered right around my birthday? Because with everything else that had been going on around here, I'd definitely forgotten about it.

Now, maybe I didn't get out to the movies too much anymore, but in my life I'd seen enough of them to have a pretty good idea how the world worked. So I was sure this envelope would contain the very prize—possibly down to the exact penny—that would save my house in the nick of time.

Fairly sure.

Back when I was in school, I heard about a guy who thought a good experiment would be to put a cat in a box with some radioactive stuff that had a 50/50 chance of killing it. As long as the box stayed closed, that cat could be either dead or not dead; until you opened the box to find out for sure one way or the other, both outcomes were true. (This never made much sense to me because eventually the cat would run out of food or air, and the radioactive stuff would be kind of moot. Plus, anyone who's ever read a comic book knows that when it comes to radiation, what doesn't kill you, gives you superpowers.) But anyway, the moral of this story—besides the fact that certain people should definitely not be allowed to have pets—is that whenever you're waiting for news that might change your life, up until the moment you find out whether it's good news or bad, both outcomes are equally real.

So, I decided to open the envelope a little bit later, like after lunch. Or perhaps in a day or two. For now I would enjoy being fifty percent a winner.

I suppose you might be thinking that if I didn't win, maybe it would be time to give up this dream, at last. To figure out something else to do. Maybe move to New Mexico and see what all that's about.

Well, I wasn't thinking that, not really. And anyway it didn't matter because I was totally sure I was going to win.

Fifty percent totally sure.

I put the envelope aside, unopened.

In the next envelope, Gladys had written to say it would be nice to have me come stay for a while, especially with the holidays coming. She said she knew my nephews would enjoy having me around, and she was sure her husband, Todd, would come around to the idea too. "Well, you know how he is," she wrote. I was never sure what she meant by that, but I'd come to think of it as part of her husband's name: Todd Well YouKnowHowHeIs. I'd only met him a couple of times, but to me, Todd seemed all right enough, it's just that he kept waiting for his real life to start, and got mad whenever he began to fear that his life was already happening. His real life, as far as I could figure out, meant being a socialite (socialito?), who limoed from club to club ordering champagne, who never had to wait in line, wore only the finest clothes, owned a fleet of sports cars and maybe a plane or two, and generally did not have to bother with the things regular people had to bother with, like errands and budgets. His plan to make this life happen was apparently to be born into a rich family and inherit a trust fund. However, he had not quite figured out how to pull that off just yet. The closest thing he had to a "trust fund" was the money Mr. Priestly kept sending Gladys to encourage her to go to nursing school.

As for my nephews, Gladdy always said her kids were allowed to follow their own paths and be whatever they wanted to be. It seemed they were studying to be TV-watchers. They practiced all the time, basically whenever they weren't fighting (or what Gladdy called "roughhousing"). As soon as their dad passed out mid-afternoon, they'd switch the channel to cartoons, or movies with lots of fast cars and explosions. They'd lay belly-down on the rug, concentrating hard, practicing TV-watching with all their might. At the rate they were going they could probably get a doctorate in TV-Watching. Maybe when they grew up they would live among the televisions like the Jane Goodall of televisions, studying TVs in their natural environment, getting accepted into the television tribe, learning their ways.