What would you do if you were suddenly rich?

I will never be one of those people who win a $200 million lottery jackpot and become fabulously wealthy thanks to a $5 investment they made at a gas station.

I know this for the simple reason that I never play the lottery.

It's not that I'm philosophically or even morally opposed to lotteries. It's that it never actually occurs to me to buy a PowerBall or Mega Millions ticket.

Seriously, I've bought maybe three of those types of lottery tickets in my entire life. And, as you might surmise, all three have been losers.

The only lottery tickets I buy are those $2 scratch-offs. The vast majority of those are losers, too, or at least the ones I end up with are.

But every once in awhile I come up a big winner, and I treat these moments as if I've just been awarded a Nobel Prize.

For one thing, I tell everyone in the immediate area, even if I don't know them. It's important to me that the old man in the grocery store who smells like moldy bread knows that I'm a winner. Do you hear me, sir? I won! I WON! I paid $2 for this lottery ticket, and now I'm going to turn it in at the customer service desk for $5. Five dollars! That's a 150% return! I think. I'm not too good with math...

Trust me, when you walk around all the time as easily impressed as me, life is an endless series of celebrations and ecstatic moments. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, that's the extent of my lottery endeavors. I just never think to actually buy one of the big-money tickets.

One reason is that I don't know how to do it. I've bought them before, but I can never remember what I said to the clerk or how you're supposed to ask for them, and I don't want to embarrass myself. I think my brain just intentionally forgets so that I don't put myself through that.

Plus, I'm a pretty single-minded guy in any shopping environment. Most of the time I don't buy anything beyond what I actually go to the store to get. I'm focused on getting through my list and getting out, and extraneous items like PowerBall tickets tend not to enter into the equation.

When you read the names of those people who win the big jackpots, you can be sure I won't be among them.

But if I DID manage to win the big prize, well...I think all of us at one point or another have thought about that. What would you do? Would you quit your job? Would you buy a new house? How many new cars?

I know one thing I would do. Well, I would do it after I gave a bunch of winnings to church and to charities that are important to me. That would come first because, you know, you really do need to pay back the universe when blessed with a stroke of good fortune of that magnitude.

The next thing I would do is call the Wickliffe City Schools and offer to pay for an entirely renovated football field with artificial turf, up-to-date stands and facilities, etc. The works. And the only stipulation I would put on this gift would be that the stadium must be named after my father. Robert L. Tennant Memorial Field is what I've always envisioned. I think he would have liked that.

Beyond that, I almost don't care. Probably a trip or two. Or three. Or four. And maybe a new car (or six). And definitely a nice new running watch with GPS technology and all of that.

And also subscriptions to 47 different magazines. I like magazine subscriptions, and I would most certainly stop working so that I had time to read them.

Then from there it would be giving monetary gifts to my family and friends. That would be the funnest part, I would think.

And I would buy myself an apple orchard so that I would never run out of apples, which as I've mentioned before are very important to me.

Then? Well...other than paying for the kids' college educations, I think the rest goes into the bank. I'm telling you, I'm a simple and relatively boring guy.

A guy who will never be rich because his brain can't multitask well enough to pick up some milk, bread and a lottery ticket. It's sad, really.

Four little things that make me inordinately happy

(1) Winning $2 on a scratch-off lottery ticket
Every once in awhile when I'm in the grocery store and I have a couple of singles in my wallet, I'll buy an instant lottery ticket. I always buy a $2 ticket on the theory that there are twice as many winners on $2 tickets than there are on $1 tickets. I have no evidence to back this up and it's probably not at all true, but I choose to believe it. Anyway, no matter which lottery game I play, most of the time I lose. My 2 dollars goes to someone else. But every so often (once or twice a year), I'll actually have a winner. And that "winner" is invariably in the amount of $2. Which means all I did was get my money back. Yet I feel like I pulled a fast one on the lottery people. I'm a simple man.

(2) Reruns of the Carol Burnett Show
One of the funniest shows in the history of the television. Tim Conway could make me laugh at a funeral. If I come across an old episode of this show, I no longer need the remote because the channel ain't changing for the next 60 minutes.

(3) Kids playing pick-up sports
I don't even care what it is: football, baseball, soccer, whatever. Just seeing kids getting together informally without uniforms, without coaches, and without screaming parents just to play a game for the fun of it tells me that we, as a civilization, are not nearly as bad off as I thought we were.

(4) Dark chocolate in any amount
If dark chocolate does not prove conclusively the existence of a loving God, I don't know what does.