FOOLISHNESS AGAIN

I bought a lottery ticket again. I know it’s foolish, but you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. I’m not naive enough to truly believe I’m going to win, but I can dream, can’t I?

Sometimes I feel like throwing caution to the wind and doing foolish things just for the fun of it. Is that a sin, or just a carefree indulgence?

Perhaps you’ve heard the joke about the two farmers who came to a one lane bridge at the same time.

The first farmer said, “I never back up for a fool!” The second farmer replied, “I always do,” and proceeded to back off the bridge. Nobody likes to be thought of as a fool. But much humor has been made from the foolishness of others. Remember the Folktale of Jack and the Three Fools?

Jack was to marry a farmer’s daughter, but one evening the daughter went to the cellar to get beer for the dinner.

She looked up and saw an ax stuck in the ceiling. She thought to herself, perhaps if she married Jack and they had a son and he grew up and came to the cellar and the ax fell on his head and killed him, how awful that would be, so she sat down and cried.

Eventually the whole family came to the cellar to see what was keeping the daughter and she showed them the ax and told them what she was thinking. They all started to cry.

Finally, Jack came down and saw what they were crying about and pulled the ax out of the ceiling. He said he would travel the world to see if he could find three bigger fools than his fiancé, and if he could, then he would come back and marry her.

So Jack first came to a farmhouse with grass growing on the roof. A woman was pushing her cow onto the roof so it could eat the grass.

She tied a rope around the cow’s neck and then passed the rope down the chimney and tied it to her wrist so she would know if the cow fell off the roof. Of course, the cow fell off the roof and hung itself, and it pulled the woman up the chimney and she suffocated from soot.

The next fool Jack met was a man who was trying to put on his pants by jumping into them. He told Jack it took him at least an hour to get dressed in the morning because putting on pants was so difficult.

The last group of fools Jack found was some people who, on a full moon night, saw the reflection of the moon in the pond and believed the moon had fallen into a pond and were trying to rake it out of the pond with rakes and brooms. Jack could see there were plenty of foolish people in the world so he went home and married the farmer’s daughter.

Yes the world is full of fools and I’m sure I join the ranks in many ways through the years.

Songs are written about fools falling in love, or rushing in where angels fear to tread. The Bible has at least seventy references to fools.

So I know it happens to many people. But surely, not to me. I read a definition of foolish.

It said that when you do something without experience and you fail, it’s considered a mistake, but if you do something with prior experience and fail, then it’s considered foolish. Well, I’ve entered the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes and the odds of winning are about two and a half million to one or more.

Hmmm. This isn’t the first time I’ve entered the sweepstakes either. I’ve been known to order something, and it came with another chance to win $500 cash if the PIN number matched the PIN on the back. I scratched off the magic number and guess what? It matched! What a surprise!

Like I said, I’ve bought another Mega Ball lottery ticket. Does this count as a mistake, or am I a fool? I know for sure it isn’t wisdom. But you can’t win if you don’t enter, or you can’t win if you don’t buy at least one ticket.