2009-08-05 - 5:13 p.m.
Every day, on big, nasty I-95, coming back into the city, I pass a billboard advertising the Maryland Lottery. The highway, there, is elevated, I think because it goes over some inlets and also because back in the sixties certain folks convinced the highway people to put it up on stilts rather than have them bulldoze neighborhoods into the opposite of neighborhoods. And so, then, the billboard, in order to do its billboard-business, has been elevated. There are a few of them along that stretch of highway, the others advertising big concerts, the Orioles, car dealers. The billboards remind me of the cards that come in arrangements of flowers: the card attached to a long, thin stick, the stick stuck into the green stuff that holds the flowers. The billboards are top-heavy, shouty, the sequoias of signs.
Shoutiest of all is the lottery sign. It's got giant numbers--each one the size of a schoolbus, maybe--that are somehow changeable. A week ago, it said that the lottery jackpot was at $75 million. This week, it's $85 million, and so on. There are three places for digits. I've seen it go as high as $205 million, or something like that.
Next week or the one after that, someone will win and then they'll get a check (they always call it a "lump sum") for $45 million or $82 million and then I'll think for a minute about that kind of money and then I'll forget about it. But passing that billboard every day has done its job, I suppose, because lately I've been thinking about this: What if money, huge amounts of it, could do extraordinary things? I don't have it worked out yet, and this may sound a little silly, but beyond money buying houses for our mothers and beyond building a school in East Baltimore, what I'm talking about is money doing something that is just beyond the reach of normal circumstances, just beyond the reach of what we, wearing our regular eyeglasses, thought we could do. Maybe the anniversary of the moon landing has gotten to me. Maybe I've got a pretty cool president. Maybe I'm tired of seeing my friend Phineas, father of six, fix things on his car using coat hangers because that's all he can afford. Maybe I'm tired of how money's used, in its regular way, for the buying of things, as the constant carrot, the thing that we run after and run after until all we've got left is billboards.
What I'm really wondering about is this: Is it possible, in some way, to marshal our forces, to summon all we've got--money and schools and internal combustion engines and snooze-button dreams--and smash it all together so that what we're left with is something to get excited about, something to be proud of, something to set up on a hill and blink at because it's just that bright?
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