Wednesday

1 March 2017

— March is coming into Denmark like a rain-bedraggled house cat.

Good Morning All,

One of the more pleasant aspects of being retired, other—that is—than each morning stretching out before me like a field filled with wildflowers, is the luxury of having the time to look forward to things. For instance, along about Monday each week I begin looking forward to Thursday evening when one of my college friends and I Skype, chat for a half-hour or so, and then—while still chatting--repair to a cyber gin-rummy website for another game at a penny point. 

At the moment, he’s up 42 games to 41 games, and—if I remember correctly—just shy of $4.00. So, the difference is about five points/pennies per game. It does not get much closer than that, though I recall one summer my dad and I played fifty-two games of cribbage out on the cottage porch, tied at 26 games apiece, and he was up by four points.

From an objective point of view, I am not at all sure why my friend has won all those games, other than that nearly every week he utterly disregards the basic rules of probability. For example, when he draws a card from the pack, he almost always gets an ace, a deuce, or a trey, and almost never anything above a six. Whereas as I tend to draw kings, queens, and jacks, no three of them in the same suit. I am also fairly certain he can see my hand in the reflection off my glasses, but I am sure he would deny it.

And recently, I’ve been Skyping, chatting, and playing cyber-backgammon with a Peace Corps friend Tuesday evenings. Into the bargain, he happens to be a computer genius who last night spent over two hours helping me clean up my computer so that today it zips along like your basic dog after your basic squirrel, as opposed to your basic three-toed sloth feeling uncommonly lethargic.

Alas, he also beat me two games to zip in backgammon and took me for forty cents. He’s been playing backgammon about a month. I’ve been playing for thirty-odd years after being taught by an Israeli who was more than serious about the game. Only because I am such a gracious loser will I say nothing about my Peace Corps friend’s wanton snubbing of the probability laws. I shall observe only that his getting doubles six times in a row rests my case.

The high point of the evening came, however, when he broke the global silence surrounding the sonnet I sent out yesterday. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I got about halfway through your poem, when I was suddenly inspired to write something myself.” He then read to me what he’d written, though I was unable to attend to his words, for to receive such a compliment (or at least something that could be loosely construed as a compliment) was akin to throwing a peanut shell off the edge of the Grand Canyon and less than a minute later hearing (against all the laws of probability) a resounding splash.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron