10 | MARCH 17 • 2022
essay
Playing the Hand
You’re Dealt
I
and a lot of other folks
recently have learned how
important our regular
poker/canasta/bridge/mahj
games were, when COVID
showed up and
made it much
harder for us to
meet in person.
And while many
of us found ways
to play online
or on Zoom, we
soon learned
that the intimate experience
of guys or gals getting togeth-
er around a card table was
not the same online.
There’s something special
about getting together in
person for a regular game.
There’s the commitment, evi-
dent when you say, “See you
next week” as you’re leaving.
There’s the feeling of cama-
raderie, similar to being on
a softball or bowling team
or in a tennis or golf league.
Although in a card game you
are not all on the same team
against other teams, you still
feel like you belong to some-
thing. There are shared mem-
ories of “Do you remember
the time when …?”
My Thursday night poker
game includes seven or eight
guys who have met almost
every week for 40-plus years,
with each guy, in turn, host-
ing the group. While most of
us don’t socialize often out-
side of the “Game,” we enjoy
each other’s simchahs and are
there for each other’s losses.
However, the mild-mannered
guys in our cohort sudden-
ly morph around a card
table into vehement poker
mavens, with nicknames like
the Bad Seed, the Eggman,
the Sandman or Last Card
London.
Most of the guys are now
retired or semi-retired. For a
long time, when we all were
working, Thursday-night
poker served a vital function
to get us through our work
weeks. I recall a voice in my
head which called to me,
starting on each Monday
morning: “Thursday night, if
you can only get to Thursday
night, you’ll have the Game to
help you get to Friday and the
weekend.”
The anticipation of our
weekly game felt like an oasis
in the desert: A place apart
from the rest of the world and
the demands of work, paren-
tal and spousal duties. We
could almost be guaranteed at
least one or two belly laughs
each week.
However, scheduling the
game has recently been more
and more difficult, due first
to some of the guys spend-
ing more time in Florida in
winter months and then to
COVID.
The game took a major hit
15 years ago when my best
friend from childhood, Wally
(called Walt by the poker
guys) moved to Arizona.
Wally was the cause of more
raucous laughter than all the
other guys combined. As an
example, one of the guys,
before COVID, who commut-
ed to our game almost every
Thursday from Windsor,
was immortalized by Walt’s
famous comment: “There are
50 words for snow, but appar-
ently no Canadian words for
‘I fold!’”
An even more serious blow
was the loss of our good
friend Marty to lung cancer
three years ago. Marty (the
Kid) was a guy who knew
how to tease me and others,
but always in a loving way.
Since his passing, we play his
favorite game our first hand
every week in his honor, and
we are always aware of his
absence from the table. He
was a wonderful friend who
taught us all the meaning
of healthy competition and
overall menschiness.
Our good buddy Eliot
(Bubba) also had the nerve to
move to Florida last year with
his significant other. Some
folks just have no sense of
priorities. The rest of us are
still trying to keep the game
alive, but some weeks are
tougher than others.
I am reminded of a memo-
ry from my childhood of my
dad’s weekly Monday bridge
games with his friends. I
liked it when they came to
our house after dinner, for
their two-table game, about
once every two months. My
siblings and I got first dibs
on the snacks, and my dad let
me deal out the cards, until
one week where I sneakily
gave one player 13 spades.
The guys were ready to call
Ripley’s Believe It or Not until I
fessed up.
But my memory shifts to
a later time, recalling how
my dad’s weekly game was
forced to change as his guys
got older. First, they moved
to playing during the day,
since driving at night wasn’t
so easy. Then, they started
having more difficulty find-
ing enough guys for a game,
due to deaths and illnesses.
Eventually the game just
stopped. At the time, I saw
how disappointed my dad
was, but, of course, I didn’t
foresee anything similar ever
happening to me.
So now, of course, what
goes around has come
around. When I look around
the poker table, I see an
older version of our younger
selves. We have more diffi-
culty seeing the cards as they
are flipped up on the table.
And we all make a few more
mistakes in playing the hands
we are dealt, which we laugh
about with a shared sense of
the inevitable.
On a recent plane trip to
visit family in St. Louis, I was
talking to the fellow next to
Jeff London
PURELY COMMENTARY