Tan, rested and ready – but for what?  My week-long getaway to Margaritaville, kids in tow, allowed me to catch up completely on sleep and pulp fiction but only to partially escape the heinous stupidity of a stock market in Fed-watching mode.  There was maybe even a touch of the old Tulip-o-mania, too. Or so I should infer, perhaps, having learned inadvertently yesterday via a sports-bar TV that the Dow Industrials had risen nearly 300 points in a single session.

Try as we sometimes do to tune out such piffle, even if for just a few blissful days, the headlines have a way of insinuating themselves on our brains no matter where we are.  Another margarita or two might have softened the blow, but that would have wrecked the quality time I’d planned with my two sons, teaching them how to handicap sulkies and to exploit the sundry advantages of simulcast wagering.

Taste of Sin

The boys got their first taste of sin betting small sums on jai alai a couple of years ago, when they were, respectively, ages 10 and 13. Luck was on their side, as it often is, and they both left with more in winnings than they’d been able to accumulate in saved allowances over the last few years.  This time, I figured that dropping a few bucks on the pacers would be just the thing to introduce them to gambling’s dark side. However, my intentions went awry when the longshot they’d bet on broke from the pack at the final turn, dusting the field in the stretch to win by two lengths.

Daniel, my twelve year-old, wanted to try parlaying his winnings into a then-available $40 million lotto jackpot, but I decided that cashing a $114 ticket was easy money enough for one day. He’s still the biggest lottery winner I’ve known personally, having collected a $14 prize on a scratch-off ticket he’d bought from a Safeway vending machine. One doesn’t want one’s kid to get the idea that betting on games of chance is the ticket to wealth, but it sure is tempting for me to have the lucky little devil pick my numbers whenever Powerball's jackpot spirals into the zillions.