Daily Archives: July 9, 2014

Family, Minnesota

Rules of the Game

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Ruth and I played blackjack tonight. I dealt and she still won. Just going into third grade,2011 09 11_1118 her math skills are more than up to the game and her betting showed some uncanny, if randomly lucky, skills, too. She had played some version of the game in school with her teacher, but the real game is a bit harsher, less forgiving. That’s the one I play and the one I taught her.

Cards have been part of my life since I began delivering newspapers. My parents weren’t game players of any sort, so all the card skills I’ve developed came away from home. Starting at age 8, I would gather with ten or fifteen other young boys in a wooden shed where we waited while the old press rumbled through the daily run of the Alexandria Times-Tribune. Sometimes the web would break, the web is a v-shaped piece of metal that folded the newsprint as it came through the press, ready to become a newspaper. This would require much cussing and hurrying on the part of the printers, but it also meant that sometimes our games extended well past the usual half hour or so.

Later, in junior high I began playing poker with a regular group of guys and our game continued through high school. Once in college I veered toward bridge, playing duplicate bridge in a local league and endless hands in an endless game in the student union. After college, the people I knew well, my friends and work colleagues, didn’t play cards, so I set aside that long history.

Only lately, in the past 4 or 5 years, have I picked up regular cards again, playing the five handed version of sheepshead that I report on here occasionally.

Still, I have many hours of card playing behind me and the memory of it has given me an excellent “card sense.” Card sense carries across various sorts of games and refers to an intuitive knowledge of how a hand might develop.

I may not knit or sew, have carpentry skills or fix-it talent, but I can teach my grandchildren how to gamble. An odd realization, but there it is.

 

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Demi-Monde

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Summer                                                                   Most Heat Moon

Yesterday I did an experiment in sleep deprivation. Not intentionally, of course. As I gained back an hour to an hour and a half at a time over the day-necessary because of the sleep lost that night-my mind began to lose track of the sleeping/waking distinction. I would wake up, still clinging to the dream state and still tired enough to be only partially awake. Then, tiredness would take over and push me back to bed, the waking state only partially realized while I was up.

Sundowning.  In a strange place like a hospital, how the elderly could enter a state like the one I experienced yesterday, the disoriented state called sundowning, became obvious to me, sleep disrupted and coming in uneven increments over a 24 hour period. Once untethered from the usual clear demarcation between awake and asleep it could be very difficult to find your way back to it.

It was not unpleasant, at least for me, but if the outside world, the world outside my dreamy/semi-awake state, had demanded normal attention, I could easily have become agitated, unable to understand the expectations. Then, others would have become concerned about me. They would have wanted to “help” me return to the usual way of experiencing day and night. The harder they pressed, the more difficult it would become. At least I can see how that might happen.

Remembering my father-in-law Merton as he neared death, he seemed to float in an idiosyncratic demi-monde most of the time. Near the end he reported angels descending, coming for him. This may well have been his reality, rather than a dreamy experience. Once in this place epistemology becomes untethered too and our ways of knowing enter a different metaphysical realm. In other words our reality becomes different from that of the consensus, though we don’t know that. At that moment we have passed through a portal, not to the Otherworld, but to an Otherworld.

It could be that death comes to us, probably does come to many of us, in a demi-monde of our own. It might come, in that case, in the cliched form of a beloved parent or other relative. Or, angels. Or, depending on your inner compass, a demon from the depths of your own hell. Me, I’m hoping for a slow stroll into Arcadian fields where, bounding toward me, are all the dogs I’ve ever loved.