And the Winner Is . . .

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

When we got married my husband told me, “I promise you may get angry with me, but you’ll never be bored.” For a man who is not particularly self-reflective, that observation turned out to be astonishingly prophetic—with  heavy dose of the “never be bored” part. Years ago, at a couples dinner with some of my cousins, he was voted the Most Eccentric Family Member. By a landslide.

He has always been hard-working, but he chaffs at having to do the same thing over and over, so somewhere in the back of his head, he became convinced that if we were wealthy, our lives would be less restrictive. With that in mind, he began a campaign to build a tidy sum in the bank. He tried dumping his change in a slot machine when we went to visit my grandmother in Las Vegas. That turned out badly for the $10 he had in his pocket.

Then he hit upon the idea of winning a contest. A local radio station was promoting their business by offering a $1000 prize to listeners who could follow their string of clues and discover the location of each of their hidden call letters–KRSP–in a treasure hunt over a period of a couple of weeks. Clues were unveiled on the air at scheduled intervals, and my husband leaped into the competition with all the dedication of an Olympic athlete. When the station announced the time of the next clue revelation, the rest of life stopped as my husband fumbled for the station on his little portable radio. (Naturally, he had to invest in the expense of his own “high tech” transistor radio, so static wouldn’t interfere with his focus.) I will never forget standing at the pulpit in church giving a talk, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw my husband slip in his earbuds to listen to the next clue. (He didn’t mention what he thought of my talk.)

He’s a bright guy, and he, along with a number of others, found the first three letters. Now the search for the “P” began. It was high winter and snowing when he took a day off from work and set off in pursuit of the elusive “P”. A couple of hours after he left the house, I got a call from a highway patrolman who had found our car abandoned alongside I-15 near the Lagoon exit. “There’s no sign of your husband,” he told me. Then he spent several minutes interrogating me about my husband’s possible mental health. Was he depressed? Did he have a history of drug abuse? “Nah,” I said. “He’s just treasuring hunting.”

He did find the “P”. Unfortunately, someone beat him to it and the prize money by only 15 or 20 minutes. But undaunted and exhilarated by his adventure, it wasn’t long before he stumbled upon another contest which would assure us a ”higher standard of living”. This time the whole family had marching orders.

Coca Cola was sponsoring a national contest whose prize was a BRAND NEW HOUSE! Now he had my attention. It was simple. All we had to do was fill out an entry and attach two Coke bottle caps or a reasonable facsimile. OK. I could do that. But my husband had a bigger idea. One Saturday afternoon he disappeared mysteriously, and when he came back, he was carrying a huge cardboard box which he unveiled Monday night at Family Home Evening (lovingly referred to by my teen-agers as Family Home Barf!).

The box contained 1500 entry forms along with 1500 sets of “reasonable facsimiles” of soda bottle caps which he’d copied from the caps of the two bottles of Coke he drank in the parking lot before he entered an Office Max. (I am not making this up!) Now the plan was to form a family assembly line, fill out the forms, staple the facsimiles to the entries, and send the results to Coke’s corporate offices.

It took the better part of two hours, a dozen worn out Bic pens, an ongoing staple gun war, plus a good deal of laughing/whining on the kids’ parts and yelling and ordering of “back to work” on my husband’s part. But we did it. (I should have taken pictures.) The next morning my husband mailed a large box stuffed with official entries. Sadly, —we didn’t win. Turns out the family who did win had done exactly what we had done. They just filled out 3,000 entries. (I’m pretty sure they didn’t have eight kids helping that process, so kudos to them for effort.)

That pre-marriage promise my husband made to me was dead on. I’ve never been bored. Two summers ago, he and several adult sons, one son-in-law, one daughter-in-law, and almost a dozen teen-age grandchildren spent three days in Yellowstone looking for Forest Fenn’s multi-million dollar treasure. (They left from the parking lot after the party our kids threw for our 50^th’ anniversary.) This year somebody else found that prize. But I’m guessing whoever found it didn’t have near the fun. Maybe there’s a treasure somewhere in there after all.