Rather anti-climactic, I think. Perhaps I should have left the story as it was, with the find of the tickets and the spooky coincidence of the dates.
But I didn’t.
What I did do was head over to the address on the ticket, since I had to go and pick up the black boy from his 3 day stay at the doggy hospital for eating something poisonous. The poison in question turned out to be not a kebab stick, as I thought, but glad wrap. Stoopid doggie. $800.00, doggie. You had better poop gold lined doggie-doos this week.
Now, the prize winning home.
The ticket shows the street name, so we drove up and down the street looking for a house that could be seen from a similar rise, a similar angle to the ticket.
It wasn’t hard to find. Because, short of a lick of paint and the fact that trees grow, the house looks exactly the same. No renovations have been done. No second story, no lets-build-a-fence, not even a re-concrete of the driveway – even the letterbox remains unchanged. The 1969 state-of-the-art tilt a door is the same one. The front door is the same one. Even the trees (see that tiny row up the centre of the drive?) are still there, albeit now very mature.
No lime green Datsun though, sadly.
By the look of the house, the original owners (winners?) still live there. Everything, neat as it is, looks frozen in time. Even the paint job looks like it has never been changed.
So what did I do, I hear you ask. Knock on the door, ring on the bell, tap on the window too?
Noo-oo.
I put one of the red and white tickets in an envelope, and on the front, wrote HaPpY BiRtHdAy HoUsE! and popped it into their letterbox. No name, no number.
They will probably be thinking “Who is the nut job that did this?”, if the are the original owners. If not, they may not have ever known they live in a prize home and be intrigued at their birthday gift.
Who knows, it may even prompt them to buy a new letterbox.
