Ball 34 tumbled out and the attic filled with the smell of oranges and woodsmoke. A family sat around a long kitchen table, and grandmother had a basket of numbered tokens. People say the game came into homes around this time, when the big public lottery was paused for the holidays and families made their own.
Here, every number also stood for a picture. Grandmother — Smorfia, she said, “like the old dream books” — drew a token and did not read the number. She said the picture instead. “Fish,” she said, and the children looked at their key to find which number meant fish.
“A number is just a number,” Smorfia said, “until you decide it means something. Then it is a symbol.”