Monday, January 19, 2015
Strange Magic
It's strange how close you become to your fellow bridge players. Most you don't know well, yet you know they always clear their throat when they are thinking or they click their fingernails before playing a card. I can tell that laugh is Penny's if I hear it from across the room but I don't know much about Penny's life history or if the throat clearer grew up in Indianapolis or Des Moines. For some reason you are connected to these people the way you might be to a family member, you might even see them more often than your own family members. When they get sick, you console them, when they have a birthday, you celebrate.
It's hard to figure because other than bridge, there might not be a thing you have in common. Politics, religion, race, education, marital status, economic status - people at the Bridge Center are all across the spectrum and your favorite person there may be on the opposite end of it from you.
Not long ago one of our own was taken ill and spent many weeks in the hospital. We thought he was doing well and that he was going to pull through, but he passed away a few days ago. We were all quite sad and spoke of how much we will miss him. But no one, not even his regular partner, knew much about him. Not that he was 52 years old, that he had been married and divorced, that he had a daughter, a son, and some grandchildren.
We just knew he was a good bridge player and could be very humerous at times. Once he taped a sign to his shirt that said "Gone to my happy place. Back soon."
It's oddly comforting knowing there's a community of people where you feel so connected to one another - for no real reason at all- that if you go away, even to your happy place, you will be missed.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
A Very Moving Story
At the Bridge Center, we play our hands, thank our opponents and move to the next table. In order to remember that we go to the next higher numbered table and the cards we just played go to the next lower one, our feeble minds have a little saying: "People go up to heaven; cards go down to hell."
I didn't realize there was a method to this until one day our director said we were using a Mitchell movement. Prior to duplicate bridge I had only heard of a movement as it related to a symphony or a bowel, so a Mitchell movement was new to me.
Our game directors are so brilliant they could be nuclear physicists, but instead they dutifully come to the Bridge Center every day and compute the number of players for a particular game, divide that by the number of tables needed and then a certain movement is employed. I'm pretty sure they use the equation E=mc2 to figure it all out. It's quite impressive.
The other day the proletariat were assembling unaware of this complicated, high level calculus and two players wandered into another room. They apparently went searching for miniature vanilla tootsie rolls in the hard candy bowl and the director didn't put them into the equation. She scribbled on her blackboard for a few minutes, turned, held up a chalky hand and announced a Howell movement was required. I thought at first she was saying "howl" and that we were to wail each time we got up. So we played the boards and I got up and howled but since I was the only one who did, I figured I had misunderstood.
Anyway, after we played that round the two candy seekers re-appeared, their mouths so full of tootsie rolls their cheeks were all poked out. When the director saw them she was stunned. Stop the game! We have a half-table! Half-tables gum up the works, so it was back to the drawing, er, blackboard.
Chalk dust was everywhere. Our poor, but still brilliant director looked like a Mexican wedding cake she was so densely covered in white but her hand worked furiously across the board numbers and letters filling it until she once again turned to us breathless and said: "I've got it! We are going to use the Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement."
The Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement is one in which you are given a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp with each round printed on it and the table at which your are to sit. Every third table you were to skip if it was odd numbered but if it was an even numbered table you were to encircle it with three other players holding each others' hands singing "Kumbaya." Every fifth table you sat out and rooted through the hard candy bowl until the next round (by then, however, all the vanilla tootsie rolls would be gone).
So the Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement made for a long day of bridge, as you can imagine, with all the skipping and sitting out and singing that had to be done. But I must say, it sure beat the time we used the Swing Your Partner 'Round and 'Round movement. Now that was really exhausting!
I didn't realize there was a method to this until one day our director said we were using a Mitchell movement. Prior to duplicate bridge I had only heard of a movement as it related to a symphony or a bowel, so a Mitchell movement was new to me.
Our game directors are so brilliant they could be nuclear physicists, but instead they dutifully come to the Bridge Center every day and compute the number of players for a particular game, divide that by the number of tables needed and then a certain movement is employed. I'm pretty sure they use the equation E=mc2 to figure it all out. It's quite impressive.
The other day the proletariat were assembling unaware of this complicated, high level calculus and two players wandered into another room. They apparently went searching for miniature vanilla tootsie rolls in the hard candy bowl and the director didn't put them into the equation. She scribbled on her blackboard for a few minutes, turned, held up a chalky hand and announced a Howell movement was required. I thought at first she was saying "howl" and that we were to wail each time we got up. So we played the boards and I got up and howled but since I was the only one who did, I figured I had misunderstood.
Anyway, after we played that round the two candy seekers re-appeared, their mouths so full of tootsie rolls their cheeks were all poked out. When the director saw them she was stunned. Stop the game! We have a half-table! Half-tables gum up the works, so it was back to the drawing, er, blackboard.
Chalk dust was everywhere. Our poor, but still brilliant director looked like a Mexican wedding cake she was so densely covered in white but her hand worked furiously across the board numbers and letters filling it until she once again turned to us breathless and said: "I've got it! We are going to use the Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement."
The Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement is one in which you are given a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp with each round printed on it and the table at which your are to sit. Every third table you were to skip if it was odd numbered but if it was an even numbered table you were to encircle it with three other players holding each others' hands singing "Kumbaya." Every fifth table you sat out and rooted through the hard candy bowl until the next round (by then, however, all the vanilla tootsie rolls would be gone).
So the Three Quarter Extended Howell-Worger movement made for a long day of bridge, as you can imagine, with all the skipping and sitting out and singing that had to be done. But I must say, it sure beat the time we used the Swing Your Partner 'Round and 'Round movement. Now that was really exhausting!
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Like Daughter, Like Father
The other day at the Bridge Center I paused for a moment before playing my hand. Initially, it was to figure out how on God's green earth I was going make my contract with all my mirrored losers. Then my eye caught the N/S pair at table 1.
A daughter was playing with her father. She favored him with her refined nose and dancing blue eyes. They made such a sweet tableau that I got lost in it. You could see he was having difficulty handling his cards so she arranged for the table ahead of them to sort his before passing down the hands.
After all, it was he who introduced her to the game he loved when she was just a little girl. She and her parents would go to her grandparents to visit and the bridge table was always set up. There it was when they walked in the door ready for the four adults to play: cards, score pad, cigarettes and M&Ms. They played for hours while she kept herself busy. Eventually she would hear her mom or dad say, "Next hand, the dummy puts Carolyn to bed." That's when her grandparents would bid ANYTHING just to get the contract to so one of them could put her to bed.
Now it's just the two of them and they play every week, enjoying their time together. After all these years, Carolyn says she can read her dad's mind at the bridge table and after they have bid two suits, she knows his next bid will be 3 no trump, if not 6 or 7. "He doesn't care about points, he'd rather go down 4 than miss a game! An engineer, my dad thinks he can manipulate the cards any way he sees fit." And when her mom was still alive, she and Carolyn would share laughs over his wild bidding.
The game for her family spanned three generations and kept them together through the years. It says a lot about a game. It says a lot about a family. Sadly, it's ending at Carolyn's generation. None of her children, who are in their 20s and 30s, plays the game.
Has the time come for the family bridge table to be folded up and sold at a yard sale? Would anyone even buy it?
A daughter was playing with her father. She favored him with her refined nose and dancing blue eyes. They made such a sweet tableau that I got lost in it. You could see he was having difficulty handling his cards so she arranged for the table ahead of them to sort his before passing down the hands.
After all, it was he who introduced her to the game he loved when she was just a little girl. She and her parents would go to her grandparents to visit and the bridge table was always set up. There it was when they walked in the door ready for the four adults to play: cards, score pad, cigarettes and M&Ms. They played for hours while she kept herself busy. Eventually she would hear her mom or dad say, "Next hand, the dummy puts Carolyn to bed." That's when her grandparents would bid ANYTHING just to get the contract to so one of them could put her to bed.
Now it's just the two of them and they play every week, enjoying their time together. After all these years, Carolyn says she can read her dad's mind at the bridge table and after they have bid two suits, she knows his next bid will be 3 no trump, if not 6 or 7. "He doesn't care about points, he'd rather go down 4 than miss a game! An engineer, my dad thinks he can manipulate the cards any way he sees fit." And when her mom was still alive, she and Carolyn would share laughs over his wild bidding.
The game for her family spanned three generations and kept them together through the years. It says a lot about a game. It says a lot about a family. Sadly, it's ending at Carolyn's generation. None of her children, who are in their 20s and 30s, plays the game.
Has the time come for the family bridge table to be folded up and sold at a yard sale? Would anyone even buy it?
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