The Patriot Post® · The Powerball, Mona Lisa & Me

The older I get, the fewer things I seem to understand. I’m not referring to my own declining mental faculties, but to the oddities of others and mine as well. For instance, when the Powerball prize money soared through the stratosphere recently, I bought a ticket. But I didn’t really want to be a billionaire.

For one thing, I’ve never envied a billionaire. I’m not sure if I’ve even liked any. Although the Koch brothers had struck me as being pretty down-to-earth straight-shooters, when I was putting together one of my books, I politely approached them to request an interview and I never received a response.

Over the years, whether it was for my column in the L.A. Times, TV Guide, Holiday, Emmy or one of my three interview books, I never resented it if someone turned me down. I could accept that they were busy and had other things they preferred to do or needed to do or had simply grown tired of answering questions.

It was only when they didn’t even get back to me, even though they’d all had secretaries and private assistants to do that very thing that I would get angry. At least when you’d been rejected, you could scratch off their name and move on. Otherwise, you were left dangling, wondering if they were still considering a get-together and trying to settle on a date.

As I was saying, billionaires don’t tend to impress me. I mean, aside from the fact that they have a lot more money than I do, I don’t find them very appealing. I can’t imagine sitting down to read a biography about George Soros, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg or Warren Buffett. The way they’ve gone about making their money doesn’t interest me, I guess, because the money itself doesn’t interest me.

So why did I buy a Powerball ticket? As dumb as it sounds, I suspect it came down to the fact that someone was going to win it, and it might as well be someone who wasn’t going to blow it on cocaine, hookers or trying to double it on the stock market.

Unlike most people, maybe because I am an optimist at heart, once I bought the ticket, I assumed I would win. So, naturally, I had to begin planning what to do with the money. First off, I would have given some to friends and relatives, enough to show my good intentions, but not enough to turn their lives topsy-turvy or curtail their own ambitions.

I would have donated to medical research that concentrated on cancer, Alzheimer’s and childhood afflictions. I would have spent a fair amount to help a decent conservative win the presidential election and to keep the White House and the fate of our beloved America out of the hands of an Obama wannabe.

I would of course have bought my wife whatever she wanted, but that would most likely have involved an all-expense paid family reunion, rather than furs or jewels.

For myself, the only luxury item I really want is a chauffeur, and that’s only because I hate driving.

Clearly, I am not the sort of person you read about who wins a lottery and is then bankrupt within a year or two. The truth is I have very little sympathy for the schnooks who blow their financial security on a ton of cocaine, but maybe even less for those who feel that winning a lottery somehow, magically, brings with it an economic acumen that even the likes of Alan Greenspan, Thomas Sowell and Bernard Baruch, would have envied.

For example, years ago, I found myself interviewing Norman Lear for an Esquire profile. Thanks to having created and produced such TV hits as “All in the Family,” “The Jefferson’s” and “Maude,” he had accumulated a great deal of money. Even after divorcing his wife, he had over $100 million in his poke.

But, as he confided to me, he had come perilously close to losing everything he had in an ill-advised attempt to create a publishing empire. At the conclusion of the interview, as he was showing me out, I paused at the door to say: “Norman, the next time you consider doing something that stupid again, give me a call and I’ll talk you down. Possibly you have been rich for so long that it’s slipped your mind, but whereas there is barely any difference between $100 million and $200 million, there is a chasm as huge as the Grand Canyon between $100 million and nothing.”

I suspect some of you are skeptical when I say what I would have done with the Powerball fortune. But why would I lie? The fact is there are probably monks wearing saffron robes sitting on mountain tops in Tibet who spend more time daydreaming about pricey do-dads than I do.

Nearly every day of my life, rain or shine, I wear tennis shorts, tennis shoes and Hawaiian shirts. I don’t wear any jewelry, and even resent having to wear a watch. But I hate being late and prize punctuality in others.

I have no wish to collect paintings or sculptures or pre-Columbian artifacts or anything else you can name. If you hung a Monet on my wall, I might go weeks without noticing it. Blind people have no call to envy my visual sense. If I did happen to notice, say, the Mona Lisa hanging over the couch, I’d ask my wife how it got there. If I noticed it a second time, I’d already be tired of it and would ask Yvonne if she’d object to my sticking it in the garage or passing it along as a Christmas gift.

Speaking of paintings, I don’t get museums or galleries. I understand why someone might like to take up painting as a hobby, as an excuse to spend a few serene hours trying to paint a meadow or a beach or a naked lady, but I can’t begin to imagine what compels people to spend time on a nice day inside looking at the stuff other people have painted.

To me, the worst are those phony-balonies who ooh and ah over a picture of an apple and a banana, pretending to be thunderstruck by the shading and the proportions, or the way the red of the apple and the brown spots on the banana appear to play off each other like nymphs cavorting near a waterfall.

In short, these artsy-fartsies will parrot the art critics in making the sort of pretentious comments about fruit hanging on a wall that nobody in the entire history of the universe has ever said about actual apples and real bananas sitting on a table and minding their own business.