At the time I won the lottery I had been in love with Three’s Company for five years, and the show was forty-six years old. That seemed significant at the time, because my father was forty-six when he died. My father smoked a pack a day and drank, killing himself slowly, then got impatient and killed himself all at once. I was twelve when it happened. He was an unpredictable man prone to loud, drunken outbursts or cold, distant stretches of sobriety, but then he’d come home from work and meet me in the doorway, gather me in his arms, and say, How’s my girl! Or, when I was smaller, he’d put me atop his shoulders and walk me around, holding onto my hands—moments of love so shining and stunning I could never think too poorly of him. And then he did the best thing an uneven parent can do: he died. And he did it himself, with a shotgun, which always struck me as a little glamorous. A little gutsy. Perhaps because of his largeness of mood and method of death he seemed mythical to me as I got older, and I often wondered if he had watched Three’s Company when it first aired. I liked to imagine him as a young man sitting in his mother’s living room, drinking a beer and watching her floor-model television, my grandmoo young again and napping in her armchair.

The image gave me such pleasure, my TV and biological families made one. It made time, the idea of time, sing in my blood. Whenever I’d wake up strangling in the dark, or was caught unawares by an unpleasant memory, or whenever someone at the warehouse where I worked tried to tell me about their divorce or dumb kid or money troubles, or whatever small item had crawled up their ass and died that day, I would sometimes picture my father, young again, sitting and watching my favorite show, laughing at all the corny jokes. The nature of death, of history, of decay and molecular aging became one intersecting and beautiful pattern in those seconds, and I could believe that life was more than the meaningless misery it had become.

But even more than my dead dad, I dreamed about Three’s Company itself. How can a person explain their love of something inanimate? Or worse, a television show that belongs to everyone? It’s so personal. My father would take us to church sometimes during one of his stretches of sobriety, and sometimes my love of Three’s Company reminded me of prayer. I remembered sitting quietly in the hushed sanctuary, every head around me bowed with eyes closed, like they’d gone to sleep. I would pinch my arm to resist laughing. After I started collecting the DVDs, though, and after I had watched every episode three or four times all the way through, back-to-back, and then started collecting the TV Guides and other clipped articles with the cast and crew, and sometimes even a reproduction episode script, I understood the concept of religion, the one-sided relationship with the intangible. Like God, the show never talked back to me. It felt familiar and reassuring, yet I could find something new to love every time. It took place in a time period I would never truly understand, having never lived in it, and for all its relatability, there would always be something unreachable about it. I kept returning, returning, wanting terribly to be let in, looking forward to the day I might achieve full enlightenment. I finally knew what it was like to love something sacred and deep, to own an appreciation so big that its gravity felt like returned love.