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

