"But starting in 2004, the year I turned nine and began working for Mr. Harrigan up the hill, I could count on at least four envelopes hand-addressed to me each year. There was a Valentine’s Day card in February, a birthday card in September, a Thanksgiving Day card in November, and a Christmas card either just before or just after the holiday. Inside each card was a one-dollar scratch ticket from the Maine State Lottery."
The protagonist of the story is a kid name Craig who will age slightly over the course of the story. Mr. Harrigan is a retiree who has settled in his tiny hometown following a very successful career running a number of businesses. As a result of his assumed fantastic wealth, Craig’s father makes jokes about the generosity of his son’s employer’s ritualistic sending of lottery scratch-off scratches. However, as Craig reminds him, usually at least one of the cards has a small payout. More importantly, the kid just plain likes Mr. Harrigan. Four years later, the specific type of cards Harrigan had slipped into the envelopes had changed from Lucky Devil to Pine Tree Cash. On Valentine’s Day of that year, Craig’s ritualistic scratching off the gray matter reveals a $3,000 match. And just like that, Craig becomes another person whose life is forever altered by a state lottery.
“Just about a month later, I gave Mr. Harrigan a brand-new iPhone. I didn’t wrap it up or anything, partly because it wasn’t a holiday and partly because I knew how he liked things done: with no foofaraw.”
Craig decides to use part of lottery windfall to buy a gift for Mr. Harrigan. There is much in this quote that situates the context of this gift. Harrigan’s aversion to that which is unnecessary can be extrapolated to apply to every aspect of his life. He once ran a telecom company, but doesn’t own television. And Craig’s use of the word "foofaraw" hints at the extent to which an older man has influenced the very psychic being of the young boy. Harrigan doesn’t want an iPhone because part of his definition of "foofaraw" is his steadfast commitment to the principle of Henry David Thoreau. A man doesn’t own things; things always wind-up owning men. If he accepts the phone, then merely by dint of possession he will feel the irresistible urge to use it. And the moment one starts using something is the moment that whole process of being taken over starts. Therefore, one must limit the things they want to be owned by to only that which is necessary. When Craig opens up the app on the phone that shows the Dow Jones Industrial Index figures fluctuating in real time, Harrigan decides the iPhone has become a necessity.
“C C C aa.”
Mr. Harrigan dies as a result of advanced heart disease. When nobody is looking, Craig slips the old man’s iPhone into his pocket beneath the jacket he wears lying inside his coffin. He also finds that Harrigan’s will included a provision creating a trust for $800,000 which would pass into his possessorship upon his 26th birthday. Moved by the generosity, but even more so by the sad absence in his life, Craig calls the phone lying inside the coffin buried in the ground and leaves a message on the mail thanking him for the money but expressing the sincere thought that he would trade it all away just to have the old man back among the living. The next morning, he wakes up to see that a text message has arrived, and the sender’s phone number and nickname just so happen to belong to that phone buried six feet under.
