Last week, two missives didn’t publish, due to a technical glitch. This was one. I send it now for your enjoyment, of course, but also to placate my incessant vanity. I haven’t missed a daily missive for almost eleven years — and I’m not starting now!

My friend Jake is in the pink. He’s striven a lifetime to be rich and now he is. I mean really rich – suddenly, astonishingly, robbed-the-bank, crypto rich – in the American way. And this was no fluke. “Luck,” he deflects congratulations with becoming modesty, “right place at the right time.” “Luck favors the well-prepared,” I respond.

So why isn’t he happier?

“I am,” he knuckles his forehead – his characteristic gesture of distress – “only –“

“Only what?” I prod, with an old friend’s privilege.

“It’s just…” he hesitates.

He wants to talk and he doesn’t. “Just what?”

He gazes out the window, his lunch mostly uneaten.

“You know when you’ve wanted something your whole life, dreamed of it, and then you get it? Sure you’re glad but it’s weird. You’d come to terms with not getting it, living without it, convinced yourself it was better that way, then bingo, you win the lottery. This pit opens in your gut. Why me?”

“You earned it,” I protest platitudinously. The right thing to say, only it doesn’t sound right. Cliches have their place, but not here.

“Yeh right,” he chides – we really are old friends – “nobody deserves this. Maybe ten per cent of this. But this?”

“So what now?”

He keeps looking out the window.

“Here’s the thing,” he forces his words forward. “I was fine before this. More than fine. I’d already won – the great American success story. Sure, I stayed in the game – because I had nothing better to do. You’ve got to do something and this is what I know. The idea of retirement – filling my time with bullshit – shoot me first. Busy keeps me from being crazy. You too. We’ve talked about this.”

We had, I agreed.

“I don’t need the money. Don’t want it really. People treat you differently. Because they want it. They brush against you like cats – yes sir, you’re looking so well sir. And it weighs on you, all that extra. What’s he going to do with it, people want to know. Now I’m supposed to be a philanthropist. I don’t want to be a philanthropist. It’s like you’ve got a target on your back. And nobody’s happy for you – you maybe, we go back so far – but most people are pissed it was you who won and not them.”

“So give it away.”

“Yeh, right. To whom exactly? Giving it to the kids now would kill them, turn them into blobs, destroy their incentive. And if I bypassed them, gave it to some charity, my kids would loathe me. That miserly old son-of-a-bitch.”

“Nice problem to have.”

“Thanks for the bullshit. You and everybody else. A problem is a problem, there are no nice ones.”

The absurdity of this discussion embarrassed us both. I could feel Jake pulling away – into a stratosphere of the megarich – leaving me earthbound. Or was I dreaming?

“What did Thoreau say?” he soldiered on. “I’ve been rereading him. ‘Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.’ He was right then, when we didn’t have two nickels, and he’s more right now.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I was bent on changing the subject. Jake’s whining annoyed me. I hate being annoyed by an old friend, I don’t have that many.

“You want it?” he looked at me with a mischievous grin.

He was kidding, had to be. Of course I wanted it. “That and the moon,” I smiled back.

I’ve disguised Jake in the foregoing to protect our bond. Who of us likes being seen for who we are?