There are winners and there are the rest of us.

Scientists don't know this yet, but there are people that have the Winning Gene. My mother has it. My daughter has it. Me? Nada.

My mother almost never went to school events when I was little, because she was always working. However, one school carnival does stand out in my mind. She walked me down the hill to school and she was very curious about the Cake Walk.

"What do you do here?" she asked
"Well, you just pick a number and pay a dime(!) and then you walk round and round and if the music stops when you're standing on your number, you win a cake."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
"And you win a whole cake?"

Do you know how hard it is to carry three cakes uphill six blocks?

"And to think, this only cost 30 cents!!" my mother marvelled.
Yes, that's right. She only played three times.

To say my mother is lucky would be a gross understatement.
She has won bikes, trips, contests, board games she's playing for the first time, and huge amounts of money in Reno. ("You mean you just put this little chip down like this?") Most recently, as an 83-year-old, she continues to win huge cash prizes for bowling. ("Guess my team just wins a lot!") The family joke is that it would be silly to scratch a lottery card without having her breathe on it.

I, like I said, carry no such gene.

Then, there's Delicate Flower.

DF started her winning career early in life with board games, and quickly moved up to raffles and contests. She regularly wins drawings, (she gets the best ornament for a prize--we get the lousy ones,) and scored a particular coup when she won an expensive fishing reel for her daddy out of a drawing of about a million people at a sports emporium. ("I just kept stuffing that little box with tickets...")

Last Sunday, we celebrated Teacher Husband's birthday with a trip to watch a baseball game down at DF's university. It was the last home game of the season--Fan Appreciation Day--so thoughout the game, they kept drawing names for little prizes.

"I put all our names into the drawing box!" I announced, right before the game.
"Oh, Mom, come on!" DF groaned, rolling her eyes. "Did you really?"
"Sure!" I said, cheerfully.

The first couple of innings went by. They called someone's name to win a mini-bat; they called someone's name to win a hat.

Then they called Delicate Flower's name.

"Delicate Flower! Come right up to the Appreciation Table! You just won a $25 gift certificate to the Student Bookstore!!"

"Great!!" she screamed, and scrambled up the bleachers to claim her prize.

For the rest of the game, the winners went back to receiving personal-sized pizzas.

How?? Why?? Who knows.

I keep thinking she and her Nana should team up on something, but I worry it might set off some natural phenomenon like the San Andreas Fault.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she said when she came back to her seat. "I promise never to tease you about putting our names in something like that again!"

Uh-huh. As if my signing us up had anything to do with it.