Winning in Wynnewood

As families spread out, it becomes more difficult to get everyone together in one place.

With two of our daughters on the east coast, we decided to meet for a big family Thanksgiving in Jersey City, where our youngest daughter Amy recently bought a condo which we definitely also wanted to see.

First, we would fly to Philadelphia, where our other star daughter continues to do public health research at Drexel University.  A short train ride away is the bedroom community of Wynnewood, where Gina lives with her husband Laszlo and our granddaughter Emma.

The weather had recently turned brisk, but we enjoyed several great walks near their lovely apartment conveniently located above a shopping center across from the train station.

One of the great things about discovering new places in this age of smart phones is that if you see something and are curious about the story behind it, you can look it up in real time.  As we walked past the enchanting Maybrook Mansion, a stately manor built in the style of medieval Norman castles in Scotland, we wondered how it came to be in a suburb of Philadelphia.  As it turned out, it had been completed in 1881 for Henry Gibson, a Pennsylvania businessman, art collector and philanthropist.

His 22 year-old daughter May, for whom the estate was named, inherited the property ten years later and eventually added a ballroom 60 feet long and 50 feet tall in order to host parties of up to 400 elite guests.

She also dabbled at art, building a studio in her carriage house, but social activities demanded too much of her time to become a serious artist.  It's easy to imagine an elegant life of an independent woman hosting fundraising galas in Gatsby-esque style during the age of the Suffragette movement.  However, despite her very active social life, May never married.  She also sponsored for good causes.  In World War II, she opened her home to orphans of the London Blitz.

Our 8-year old granddaughter Emma continues to dazzle us with her reading, writing, math and artistic skills.

Our visit happened to coincide with the conclusion of her Circus Arts class, so we got to see the final performance.



I don't think she's thinking of a future with the Cirque du Soleil, but she's quite good at backbends and seemed to enjoy performing on the ribbons and trapeze, despite fighting back a cold with medications that drained her energy as well as her sinuses.

At one point after the show, she was hanging from her teacher's arms as he hung upside down on a trapeze, and it looked like her arms went completely around in a way that must pull them out of joint.  Her teacher released her, and even he asked, "What was that?"  Somehow, she wasn't hurt.  Maybe the cough syrup dulled the pain.

I was especially happy to really connect with Emma on this visit.  Perhaps she's beginning to understand my odd sense of humor that had us saying in sync, "69 Dude!" when her school bus (number 69) came around the corner, but I think primarily it was that this time my being around didn't mean her parents were going on a trip.  She doesn't love anything as much as spending time with her Mommy and Daddy.

We had a lot of fun together, including playing Tripoley and Seven-Card No-Peekie Baseball Poker, which she quickly mastered.

Tripoley is a game I remember playing on the living floor with my sister and sometimes our cousins.  We could occasionally talk Mom into playing, though she was usually busy doing thankless housework that kept our lives so comfortable.

Emma wasn't familiar with Tripoley, so she allowed me to be her helper, or what Gina would have called her "charm luck" when she was Emma's age and helped me play a hand of Bridge at my sister's house in Newport Beach after school on Wednesdays.

While much of Tripoley unfolds almost automatically, and luck plays as much a part as strategy, it starts with a hand of poker, which Emma had never played.  After that first game, I dealt some cards to play Five-Card Draw with her, but soon we realized that didn't include quite enough cards to understand the opening hand in Tripoley, where having ten cards made better hands the norm. We switched to Seven-Card Draw, and Emma was soon winning hands without my advice on which cards to play.

Nana suggested No-Peekie Baseball, a game I learned from a friend of my parents when I was a about ten.  It became a staple in poker games for pennies against my old pal Pete, with whom I had many memorable hands over the years, including one where my fifth ace beat his five kings.

The Baseball element of No-Peekie means threes and nines are wild and with fours you get another card from the deck to add to your hand, with all those numbers having a relationship to baseball.  Three is the number of outs in an inning, and apparently because three strikes and you're out, you have to pay a penalty for getting one even though it is overall positive for your hand.  Nine is the number of players on a team and the number of innings in a game.  Four are the number of balls in a walk as well as the number of bases.

Needless to say, those wild cards result in a lot of great hands among many possibilities.  Before long if I said she had two pairs or three of a kind, Emma would say, "No, this is a straight." In fact, I started calling her the Queen of Straights, because she seemed to get so many, including several straight flushes.

Emma's mom took me to her Bridge club game in Philadelphia as her guest partner one evening, while Emma stayed with Nana and, when he returned from work, Laszlo.

Gina, who somehow finds time to attend the weekly classes and games, has become quite an excellent Bridge player in a system which has nuances that have taken me a while to learn.  Everyone in her card group takes the game extremely seriously, and it felt a bit tense at first.

While I knew I would have problems with bidding, I usually am capable during the play, but nerves caused me to make a couple of obviously poor decisions that cost tricks early on.

I also touched the bidding cards --- we silently lay over cards rather than say the bid out loud so as not to alert anyone who might play Duplicate hands later how you bid --- inappropriately a couple of times.

You cannot even let your hand hover in any way that might reveal what you are thinking, and when I did so, it led to reprimands with the threat of calling the Director, which in my mind brought about the vision of a Russian Commissar slapping me with a riding crop if not throwing me in the Gulag.

As I mentioned, the bidding conventions are different than my untrained method of trying to describe my hand with straightforward bids without conventions, but I knew Gina said that if a bidder opens with a strong "No Trump" hand, then an answer of "Two clubs" meant she could play either of the major suits.

"But what if I want to play clubs?" I've asked Gina on several occasions after family games.  Gina's answer was always that finding a major suit took precedence.  In one round, I indeed found myself with 17 natural points and bid "One No Trump."  Gina answered, "Three Clubs."

Following the protocol of her Bridge group, the opponents looked at me and asked quite solemnly, "What does she mean by that?"

They expected me to provide a concise explanation, and it is my duty as a disciplined player to share that information upon request.  In fact, I am supposed to volunteer the information, saying something like "Transfer" or "Weak."

Instead, with a hint of a wry smile, I said, "I would know what she meant if she'd said two clubs," which because they knew the same bidding guidance system made them laugh, a rather hilarious joke in this very staid battle among mostly lawyers and teachers.  I was surprised the Commissar didn't come over and whack me for insubordination.  "I think maybe she has a lot of clubs?"  This led to more chuckles.  I had three high clubs myself, so despite having five spades I bid, "Four Clubs," after which Gina took us to game with "Five Clubs."

I'm not sure, but I think that might have been a contract other more technically synchronized teams might not have found.  Then again, we also benefited on a different hand at another table from a bidding conflict between two ladies.  When one bid "Four Spades" and her partner, fed up with being told how she had underbid other hands and emboldened by having high cards in every suit except spades, replied "Six No Trump."

The original partner passed, and because I held two aces which would be sufficient to set the bid if I had the chance to play them, I thought about doubling the bid.  However, I further realized that doubling would give her a chance to bid seven spades, which might somehow be a makeable contract, because I didn't have the ace or king of spades.

After what for me was a long consideration, I reached for the bidding card box, not really looking at it, and as I think back on it, perhaps I did hover over the double card before grabbing pass.

I certainly had been thinking about doubling.

We set the contract, taking four or five tricks altogether.  All of the duplicate hands we played against those ladies went strongly in our favor, prompting Six-No-Trump Lady to threaten me with Commissar punishment for my sloppy method of taking cards out of the bidding box with my left hand instead of my right, which would be the proper way to do it.  Apparently holding cards in my right hand is actually what southpaws do, and in all fairness she offered use of a left handed box.

 Despite my protocol goofs,  when we finished the last hand at the last table at the end of the night, we were shocked when the instantaneous computer scoring declared that Gina and I had actually finished first, earning some fraction of a masters point in a game that I learned was simultaneously being played at other Bridge clubs around the country.  I think we just won in the room, but I'll remember this as our national championship win.