A Million Dollars, Miracles, and Mayonnaise

If you took a million one-dollar bills and put them end to end, the line would stretch for almost a hundred miles. If you had a bag of a million one-dollar bills it would weigh more than a ton. A stack of a million dollar bills would be as tall as a 33-story building. The reason I know all this isn’t because I like weird facts, but because I once won a million dollars.

My name is Yasmine and I believe in miracles. You’d probably think anybody who won a million dollars would believe in miracles, but I don’t believe in miracles because I won a million dollars. I believe in miracles in spite of it. I believe good things can happen even when it seems like everything is going wrong. And I should know. I’ve had a lot of things go wrong in my life. Maybe not as many as some people. But enough for me.

Did you know that every year more than 6,000 African American women die of cancer? That’s something else I learned not just as a fact. I learned it because it happened in our family. It’s something I don’t like to talk about, and I only brought it up because I’m not one of those kids whose biggest problem has ever been they didn’t get a new phone for Christmas. And just because I won a million dollars doesn’t mean I don’t have any problems. The truth is, winning a million dollars was just the beginning of the worst trouble I’d ever been in my whole life.

And it all started with mayonnaise.

Copyright 2018 Terry Baldwin