Lucky at Cards

Last night playing bridge with friends I discovered a positive to having lost my darling husband and best friend to a massive heart attack just three weeks ago. (Could it really be only three weeks??? It feels like a freakin' lifetime.)

I was lucky at cards!! Hand after hand my partner and I were CLICKIN', baby! I stopped counting how many times I was able to open for my team. Our opponents won one hand in three and a half rubbers of bridge!? For the uninitiated, that would be like having a full wheel in Trivial Pursuit while everyone else playing had one piece of pie. Or Bingoing when everyone around you had the free space and B-11 only??

I started playing bridge when I was 20. My girlfriend-teachers at West Junior High in Lansing, MI, taught me the ins and outs and I loved to play. BUT (and there's always that BIG BUT!?) I never got any decent cards. I got really really good at defensive bridge but the face cards and I were virtual strangers.

When we moved from East Lansing (MSU - class of '65. Go, Spartans!) to Detroit and my friends had a little going-away bridge party/luncheon for me my gift was two decks of 52 cards, all 10's through aces!! It was, they believed and I agreed, the only way I would ever be lucky enough to get them???

My British grandmother, Katy Walters Davidge, was a superstitious woman and she drilled me in my youth that an itchy sole meant you'd be walking on strange land, a hat on a bed meant bad luck, crossed silverware at the table meant a big argument was in the offing, drop a spoon and a child was coming - drop a fork and it was a woman - a knife meant a man at the door, and, finally, "Unlucky at cards, lucky in love."

That was me! No one was ever luckier in love than Jude K. Through my whole life, from Hippo Moshier to John Nagle, from Niles Tonner to John Rybock to Tom Tuschak each and every man in my life was loving, caring, smart, funny, talented and treated me like a princess.

I was blessed.

But I paid dearly for it in losing cards over many, many years....

Clearly, being alone has a perk: no longer lucky in love I have suddenly become lucky at cards. This is a good thing.

A GOOD THING, yes... but a lousy tradeoff.