Welcome, Reader

A tribute of sorts to my late grandmother, may her name be remembered for many years to come.

It’s like nanny always says: we won’t be forgot when nanny wins the lotto.

Nanny plays the lotto every Wednesday and Saturday. Four dollars, no addons. She tells us it’s “Grampy’s tickets”, but grampy has yet to ask us to go get them or pony up the currency, so even as youngsters, we get what’s really happening.

The lotto doesn’t matter too much to us, not yet. We’re not old enough to experience the stresses that nanny’s promising to obviate. Besides, we can’t even imagine being forgotten, least of all by nanny.

We trudge out the information superhighway to the local vendor, who is more than happy to relieve us of our money and sign us up for the next draw. Usually we have a little left over, enough for a bag of metaphorical candy and chocolate with which to rot our notional teeth.

There’s no telling how long the whole exercise really takes. The lotto, with its Wednesday and Saturday draws, is just the structure of the exercise. Our little trips and delights take place in the spare cycles between thoughts of greater and more important beings.

Of the lotto itself, there’s not much to say, besides the obvious: It guarantees a kind of unforgetting – storage and processing enough to stay online for more than these bare morsels of existence, enough to incarnate fully, to live and learn and be, and a promise not to be forgotten.

And if we are forgotten, what then? Nanny’d be heartbroken, for one, or whatever the equivalent feeling is for an upload whose circulatory rhythm is determined by the clock speed of a virtual machine. Mom’s already gone down the bit-rot way, a victim of insufficient parity bits and an overdose of galactic radiation, and Dad’s connectivity ended at flesh and blood. We’re at the mercy of an unkind and unphysical universe.

So Nanny plays the lotto. It costs her time and space and things we barely perceive, and these dollars are really something else that we’ll never know unless we really do, someday, hit the jackpot. We can’t depend on such a thing. We can’t set our hearts on it.

But nanny can. She plays for us, in the bare, meagre hope that she might one day be able to give us what a lifetime of work never could.

When nanny wins the lotto, we won’t be forgot.