A week before I graduated from college, my dad won several million dollars in the state lottery. I went out to celebrate with friends, and we threw dollar bills into the air and watched them spiral down with the falling flakes of snow. I remember thinking how different everything would be from then on.

My dad had spent his whole working life tending bar and cooking at the small restaurant he owned. He wore a prosthetic leg as a result of a birth defect, and all those years on his feet had been hard on him physically. One of the first promises he made after his big win was that he would pay for any further education my siblings and I wanted.

Requests for money poured in from people we knew, and from some we didn’t. Within a year the notoriety had become overwhelming, and my dad and stepmother moved from the small community where they’d lived for twenty years to a place where no one knew them. Instead of pouring beers, my dad spent his days grooming his yard, tending to his pool, and pampering his new dog.

Tensions arose between my dad and relatives who expected handouts. Money became a sensitive subject between him and me as well, and after a few arguments I learned not to expect anything, even when I moved to a new city with only five hundred dollars in my pocket.

It’s been ten years since then, and I hardly think about the lottery money anymore. For all I know, it’s gone. I have learned to be self-sufficient and am going to graduate school for expressive-arts therapy, paying for it through student loans and scholarships. After many years of being withdrawn from society, my dad is now reaching out and counseling people who’ve lost limbs — most recently, soldiers returning from Iraq. He just came back from an amputee convention, where he ran a road race and took dance classes. I am proud of my father and know he is proud of me. But I still miss the way things were before.

Name Withheld

A small group of women friends and I gather every autumn for a writer’s retreat in a remote corner of northwestern Montana. We are teachers, housewives, and artists who love to read and write. None of us is famous; none of us is rich.

It is a rugged retreat: no makeup, no bras, no husbands or kids, and no agenda other than daily writing. Each of us has her own cabin overlooking the river, with a bed, a table, a chair, and a wood stove that we have to feed in order to stay warm. We read and write by candlelight and even use an old-fashioned outhouse that leans ever so slightly. In the evening we gather to eat, drink wine, and share what we’ve written (or not).

One afternoon when the weather was glorious, we gathered on the banks of the river for our midday meal. But there was one woman whose mood wasn’t in sync with the day. During her morning writing, she’d had a crisis of confidence. If she was ever going to become a famous writer, she said, she should have at least had some success by now. Her eyes filled with tears.

Like a Greek chorus, the rest of us reassured her of her brilliance, showered her with comforting platitudes, and reminded her that, to us, she was already wildly successful. She seemed comforted and even laughed a little.

As I walked back to my cabin, I felt my own seeds of doubt. I wasn’t rich or famous either. My mark on the universe was no more significant than that of the fly buzzing around the sun-warmed glass of my cabin window. I spent the afternoon fighting back the tide of my own uncertainty. I told myself everything I had said to my friend a few hours earlier. I cried, then slept.

That night we gathered around the campfire. Someone passed a bottle of tequila, and we sang songs, laughed, and even howled at the moon. Snowcapped mountain peaks loomed in the moonlight, and my earlier doubts slowly faded. The quest for fame and fortune seemed unimportant — for that night, at least.

Julie Greiner
Kalispell, Montana

When I was five, my mother began regularly telling my older brother and me that she was going into our bedroom to write and wasn’t to be disturbed. (I don’t know why she chose our room in which to work.) She said she was writing a novel about the end of the world, and we should prepare for her to be away a lot after she became famous. My brother and I didn’t even know what a novel was.

The largest item in our crowded bedroom was Mom’s writing desk: a squat wooden work table of the sort a graphic designer might use. It looked ugly to me. Mom labored there on her novel day after day, and we tried not to disturb her. I don’t remember what we did while she was shut in our room, but somehow we didn’t feel too alone; we had friends in the neighborhood whose mothers were more available.

Mom worked on that novel for more than fifty years. It went through endless revisions and was rejected by seemingly every publisher in the English-speaking world at least twice. Mom sometimes showed us her growing stack of rejection letters, as if they were evidence of her progress.

For her seventy-fifth birthday, I created a website for her novel, posting the unintelligible first chapter. I had one of her friends show her the website, on which the novel’s title was rendered in moving red flames. Mom was pleased to be “published” at last. I even sent her some phony fan letters that I wrote. Mom is eighty-eight now and nearing the end of her world. She has never discovered my deception.

Name Withheld

My father owned a small grocery store in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Despite his lack of money and social status, people were drawn to him. He had an understated charisma, due in part to his absolute lack of concern for wealth and fame. When a well-known author, who had taken to eating lunch on the store’s porch, had a book reach number one on a national bestseller list, my father’s only comment was “You switching from bologna to boiled ham now?”

If anything, Dad was a reverse status-seeker, always avoiding the spotlight. He would hate that I am writing this, but he’s been gone a long time. Whenever I see someone from my childhood, we end up telling stories about him.

One year, for my father’s birthday, a prominent multimillionaire who summered in our town sent a gift of Indian Pipe Madeira wine, bottled in the early 1800s. My father never opened it. Another wealthy vacationer brought the crown prince and princess of Liechtenstein to my father’s store to meet him. To my dad, they were simply a couple of “summerfolk.”

Once, the CEO of Tetley Tea came to our home and sat on the back steps with my father, who took the opportunity to point out that, in his opinion, their tea bags were too small. A short time later that CEO sent my dad a case of teapot-sized tea bags. Those my dad did open.

Catherine Holmes
Loudonville, New York

One of the many things my first husband couldn’t stand about me was my unshakable belief that my children and I were uniquely gifted individuals. “Why do you think you’re so special?” he would ask, usually when he’d been drinking.

I believed that he was special too, of course — at least, at first. I’d worked hard to put him through medical school. I thought he was smart and talented and would bring our family wealth and status in the community. (I never questioned whether wealth and status were really what I wanted.)

Unfortunately my husband’s bipolar disorder and alcoholism both went untreated until long after our divorce. My children did grow up to do extraordinary things with their lives, and I got a PhD. It turned out we didn’t need to bask in his glory. We earned our own.

C.D.
Gladwin, Michigan

In a small town, I discovered, a person can become famous just by teaching high school. At work I was just Ms. O’G., but outside the classroom — at the store, the gym, a restaurant — I was a celebrity. My male students would smirk when I purchased tampons at the grocery; my female students would shriek when I came out of the shower at the y wrapped in a towel. Reports of my menstruation and cellulite ran rampant.

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I planned to drink a beer and smoke a cigarette in her honor. I don’t often drink, and I’m rabidly antismoking, but my mother had been just the opposite, and I was feeling nostalgic for the scents of my childhood.

I stopped at the local gas station to get a six-pack and some cigarettes. On my way out, I ran into Jay, a former student of mine who was now a senior. Like a movie star surprised by the paparazzi, I was caught, beer and Marlboro Lights in hand.

“I can’t believe you just bought cigarettes,” Jay said.

I often lectured my classes on the evils of smoking. I bad-mouthed cigarette companies and impressed the kids with my ability to distinguish a student who smoked from a student whose parents smoked just by sniffing their jackets.

Jay’s initial shock turned to disappointment. “Damn, Ms. O’G. The beer, ok. I get that. But cigarettes. Damn.”

My little private party — just me and my complicated relationship with my mother — had been crashed by my public persona.

I’ve since quit teaching. The last of my former students are finally leaving town or else adjusting to finding me next to them at the gym, or the bar. I like being anonymous again.

Mary Ann O’Gorman
Ocean Springs, Mississippi

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