2022 July: The Providence NABC: 7/15-19

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Mike

The extensive preparations for the NABC in Providence are described here. Friday July 15: If there is no traffic, the drive from Enfield to Providence takes a little less than two hours. I packed up enough clothes for ten days … Continue reading →

The extensive preparations for the NABC in Providence are described here.

My bridge schedule for the Providence NABC.

Friday July 15: If there is no traffic, the drive from Enfield to Providence takes a little less than two hours. I packed up enough clothes for ten days and left the house at about 7:15. The trip got off to a terrible start. As usual, I stopped at McDonald’s in West Stafford for a sausage biscuit with egg and a large black coffee. The biscuit reminded me of a brick that had been sawed horizontally. The coffee was a couple of degrees above room temperature when it was handed to me, and it did not taste right. I cannot describe the taste, but it was definitely wrong.

The first 99.99 percent of the drive was otherwise blessedly uneventful. I had driven this route a few weeks earlier for the walk-through that has been described here. I remembered that the Rhode Island Convention Center (RICC) was very close to Route 146. The only tricky part was finding the correct entrance to the garage that was attached via a corridor on the fourth level to the third floor of the RICC. I had a distinct recollection that the right entrance was the first on the right. Therefore, I pulled in there and attempted to enter. The unmanned gate would not let me in. Evidently this was now designated as the entrance for monthly parkers. I tried to back up, but a jeep had pulled in behind me. He was understandably upset at me.

Eventually, I was able to back up and return to the street, but in the process the left side of my car scraped against something. The plastic cover for my left side-view mirror also came halfway off. I tried to push this mishap out of my mind completely until the first day of bridge was over, but it was not easy.

I found the correct entrance and drove up to the east side of the third level and parked near the stairs and elevator. It did not seem possible to get to the east side of the fourth level of the garage from where I had entered. I tried to reattach the cover to the mirror, but I did not have much success. I then climbed the stairs to the fourth level and walked across the sky bridge to the entrance to the RICC.

At the entrance to the third floor two people were checking for vaccination status. Players with an orange wristband could just walk in. Otherwise, players needed to show a vaccination card or the equivalent proof on a smartphone. Upon doing so they were presented with a stylish piece of bright orange plastic to wear on the wrist. When the band had been locked, it was very difficult to undo. I just kept mine on for all ten days that I was in Rhode Island. Then I cut it off with scissors. I don’t know what the people checking for vaccinations did if a person would not or could not show proof.

Very few people wore masks. I resolved to wear an N95 mask and to keep my distance from everyone, even teammates and partners, whenever possible. The fact that I was not staying in a hotel associated with the tournament gave me some optimism. The BA.5 variant had recently become dominant in both Europe and the Americas. Vaccines made it less lethal, but they did little or nothing to prevent transmission. Good masks worked, and the ones that I brought with me were the best available to the general public.

For the first two days I was scheduled to play with Donna Lyons, a long-time friend whom I had hardly seen since we had won the Mid-Flight Pairs at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick in 2019. Donna and her husband Bob lived in Granby in the summer and in Naples, FL, in the winter.

Donna was not at the tournament yet when I arrived. So, I went to the welcome desk and received my SWAG bag. It contained the restaurant guide and a gift. I don’t even remember what the latter was. I then went to the volunteers desk to talk with Linda Ahrens about my assignments. When I left I thought that I was clear about when I needed to show up.

Linda provided me with a stack of scrip for my entry fees¹, and Joe Brouillard, the co-chair of the tournament, provided an exit card to pay for my parking.

I picked up a copy of the Daily Bulletin to see what had happened in the GNT championship. Most of New England’s representatives, including Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves, were still in contention.

I went to the partnership area and looked for a likely partner for Sunday. The only person available was Phyllis Bloom with 800 masterpoints. I called her five times, but the line was always busy.

Soon thereafter Donna appeared. We were scheduled to play in the Open Pairs on Friday and the Bracketed 0-3,000 Swiss on Saturday. Before the morning session we went over the convention card that we had used in 2019. If we made any adjustments, they were not significant. Our morning session was disappointing. We only scored a little more than 43 percent.

I don’t remember what Donna did for lunch. I bought a Diet Coke and a bag of nuts from a vending machine. I did this every day that I was playing so that I would not get sleepy in the afternoon. This also helped me avoid the COVID trap of the lunch area.

Our afternoon session was much better. We scored above 53 percent, which earned us 1.48 red points for finishing third in B in our section. If we had done that well in the morning, I would have been quite pleased.

That direct route across eastern CT was stressful.

Donna was commuting from Granby, even though she lived considerably farther away than I did. So, she was facing roughly five hours of driving both days. I advised her not to take the two-lane route back to Connecticut, despite the insistent advice from Google Maps. Instead I told her that driving on Route 146 and the Mass Pike was much less stressful, only slightly longer, and less subject to delays from construction and slow vehicles.

After saying goodbye to Donna I went back to the garage to inspect the damage on my car. This time I was able to reattach the cover much more securely. I later tried to rig up a little more protection for the electronics by covering it with a plastic bag, but I failed to devise a way of keeping it attached. In the end I convinced myself that this arrangement was good enough to last through the rest of the trip.²

At some point on Friday Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky, my teammates for Saturday and Sunday invited me to have dinner with them on Saturday night at their favorite restaurant in Providence, Pane e Vino. I told them that I had already committed to attending the VIP reception on Saturday evening.

I then exited the garage. I had been led to expect that the entire parking charge would be covered by the exit ticket that Joe had given me. However, I was still charged $15. Evidently Joe gave me the wrong ticket.

I found my way from the RICC to the Hampton Inn in Warwick without any problem. I have stayed at dozens of Hampton Inns around the country, and it had never taken more than five minutes to check in to any of them. This time, however, only one person was on duty at the reception desk. A handful of people surrounded the desk offering advice to a woman who was trying to check in. She demanded to see the manager about whatever was impeding the process. The clerk abandoned her station for at least five minutes in order to summon him.

She returned with the unwanted news that the manager was on his “lunch break” at 6:30 in the evening. Eventually he did appear, and he succeeded at calming everyone down. All the people around the desk—except for me—went over to the lounge/breakfast area to wait for the room to be ready.

My room was very close to the entrance on the left.

I was impatient, no doubt, but there was no good reason to be. I had nothing planned for the evening. The clerk had no problems in finding a room for me. I had to provide my credit card, of course, but then she quickly handed over my key. My room was on the ground floor.

When I reached the hallway I was shocked to see trash piled there. I had never experienced anything like this before at a Hampton Inn. At least the pile did not impede my path to the room.

The room itself was fine, but it had one very peculiar trait. There was no closet! I looked everywhere that I could imagine. I mean, how do you hide a closet in a hotel room? I must have been mistaken, but I accounted in my head for every square foot of space, and there did not seem to be any place it might be.³ Because I was only staying two nights, this anomaly was of small consequence to me.

I had no trouble deciding where to eat. The hotel was within a mile of the KFC, and I had had more pleasant experiences dealing with the store than I had with the many other franchises that I had patronized over the years. This occasion was no exception. My four-piece meal was ready very quickly; it was hot and delicious.

About a week earlier I had misplaced my American Express card that awarded frequent-flyer miles on Delta. I hardly ever used that card, but it bothered me that it was missing. While I was at the KFC I noticed that it was hidden behind another card in my wallet.

I received a text from Phyllis Bloom. She was happy to play with Mike, Jim, and me on Sunday. So, my “dance card” was now completely filled for the tournament.

The book that I brought with me to Rhode Island was Newcastle Upon Tyne: Mapping the City. It was written by Mike Barke, a Professor of Geography from Newcastle. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his wife Vivienne on the European River Cruise that I took in May of 2022. That adventure is related here.

The book is a history of the Tyneside area from Roman days up to the present with maps of various types used as signposts. I really enjoyed learning about the development of the area not only because it was Mike and Vivienne’s stomping grounds, but also because it helped me to understand better what the characters on the television show Vera were dealing with. On this trip to Rhode Island I also discovered that the huge book could serve as an excellent mousepad when I was using my computer while in bed.

Saturday, July 16: My standard operating procedure at Hampton Inns had long been to hit the breakfast room early. I arrived at 6:15 and was surprised to see that it was already rather crowded. There were quite a few children dining with their parents. Most of the people wore shorts. One kid walked up to the orange juice dispenser and filled a gallon jug. I thought that this was somewhat outrageous, but no one said anything about it.

In addition to the families quite a few uniformed airline employees were among the early diners. This was not a surprise. The Hampton Inn is very close to the airport.

The drive from Warwick to the RICC was very easy. I worried about the left mirror, but the cover stayed on, and it seemed to function as well as ever.

I asked at the Partnership Desk if they needed me to help, but Jan Smola and Carol Seager said that they had it under control.

Donna and I played in the 0-3,000 Bracketed Round Robin. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. We found ourselves in the top bracket. We were in contention until the last two matches. In one of those rounds Donna timidly passed my 5♥ bid, and we missed a slam that would have really helped us. So, we finished well out of the overalls and were awarded only .69 “pity points”.

Donna needed to rush home at the end of the last match. I said goodbye to her and thanked her for playing with me. I then walked over to Joe’s desk and asked him for directions to the WaterFire event.⁴ While I was standing there I was surprised to see a distraught Donna walking toward me. She said that she could not find the key fob for her car. She said that she had looked all through her purse several times.

Donna and I searched around the areas in which she had been. There was no sign of the missing fob. Upon Joe’s advice she went to the facility’s security desk on the ground floor and asked the man there. No one had turned in anything resembling a key fob.

She then went back to her car because she said that there was an emergency method of gaining entry and operating the car. She was pretty sure that her husband could talk her through it over the phone.

So, I went out on foot on my own looking for the VIP reception for the WaterFire. I went the wrong way several times⁵. I finally found the viewing area, but I saw nothing that looked like a reception. At about 7:00 it occurred to me that the WaterFire event always took place in the dark, and the sun would not be setting in Providence for nearly two hours. I decided that it was not worth the wait. I drove back to the Hampton Inn.

I was able to exit the garage without paying. Joe had given me enough tickets for the remainder of my days. Since I was not planning on coming to the tournament on Tuesday, I gave one of the tickets to Donna.

I was shocked by two things at the hotel. The pile of rubbish had grown considerably larger, and no one had cleaned my room. Since I was leaving in the morning, these developments hardly mattered to me, but my overall impression was that this must surely be the worst Hampton Inn in the country.

Because I had again skipped lunch, for supper I treated myself to a small Ultimate Bertucci pizza. It was absolutely delicious. I ordered takeout and ate it in my room.

Sunday July 17: As I made my way to the hotel’s breakfast area I could hardly believe how big the rubbish pile in the hallway had become. It was piled high with pizza boxes. I could barely get past it. I doubt that someone with a wheelchair could have done so.

I was equally surprised that the breakfast area was closed. Evidently breakfast was no longer served on Sunday, or perhaps it was open much later than usual. I was not certain whether this was “the new normal” or just another indication of this hotel’s mismanagement.

I checked out, got into my car, and drove into Providence. I did not record in my notes what I ate that morning, but I think that it was part of the hospitality—a muffin or something like that—that the tournament provided. I picked up a Daily Bulletin and discovered that all three of the remaining GNT teams from New England had lost in the semifinals.

Mike and Jim told me that they had postponed their supper at Pane e Vino until Sunday. They asked me whether I wanted to join them. I happily agreed.

I met up with Phyllis Bloom, who was, as I suspected, Ken Bloom’s wife. We spent some time going over our card, which was rather simple. We were playing with Jim and Mike in the Mid-Flight Swiss teams. We were done in on the very last hand. Phyllis played 6♠. At the other table our counterparts bid the grand slam. Both went down one. Mike led the ♣, which enabled the declarer to finesse the 10.

So, we earned only .78 more red points. I had a good time playing with Phyllis. We did as well as a new partnership could expect. However, I think that she was a little frustrated with her mistakes.

After Phyllis left, II walked with Jim and Mike to their hotel, which was called The Graduate. We took the elevator up to their suite. Mike seemed to be a little embarrassed that some clothes were strewn about. Please!

At some point Mike also realized that he had lost his convention card. Presumably it was somewhere in the playing area of the RICC.

We picked up Jim’s car from the hotel’s parking garage and drove to the restaurant. Mike continually criticized the route that Jim took, and Jim repeatedly reminded us that Mike drove like an old woman. They do this sort of thing all the time. For years I thought that they were actually arguing, but, in fact, they almost never argued. Jim just talked all of the time, and Mike occasionally broke his vow of silence and vocalized his opinions, some of which contradicted Jim’s. However, it never went past that. Each has a lot of respect for the other, and they have been playing together for at least a decade that I know of.

The restaurant scared me. It was crowded, and no one—not even the staff—was wearing a mask. I kept mine on until we reached the booth, and I put it back on before walking to the door at the end.

I ordered the fettucine alla Bolognese and a glass of Barbera. After consulting with the waitress, Mike selected lasagna. Jim had the same veal dish that he always ordered there. The titles of all of the dishes were in Italian on the menu, but the descriptions were in English. I found it peculiar that our waitress was unfamiliar with the titles of the dishes.

I ate everything that I ordered, but the Bolognese was a little too rich for my taste. When Jim asked me if I would order it again if I ate there, I had to answer in the negative. Nevertheless, I had a good time with these guys. They are a lot more fun away from the table, but that is not uncommon for bridge players.

So, we drove back to The Graduate. I went down the elevator to walk to the RICC garage. In the lobby of the hotel I ran into Randy Johnson. I talked with him for a minute. I asked him if his wife Ann (Hudson), one of my former partners, was also in attendance. He claimed that she was too busy working at home.

I walked over to the garage, found my car, and drove to the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, which, like the RICC, is in spitting distance of I-95.

Over the next week I often saw this logo.

I walked from the hotel’s huge parking lot to the revolving door. at the main entrance. To my surprise a young man and woman were greeting people as they entered. Neither of them wore masks. They were from the annual gathering of the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, which was held throughout that week in the Crowne Plaza. I wore my mask whenever I was in or near the hotel.

I checked in in a minute or two. The hotel employees also had no masks.

I went back to KFC for supper. It was as good as the first time.

When I checked my email I found one from Monday’s partner Paul Burnham. He reported that he had just arrived in Providence. I also received the following missive from Donna:

First of all, the key fob business was somewhat of a mess and more than somewhat had me spinning. When I got to the garage, my car would not open when I touched the handles, as usually it does. Of course, I tried and tried, tried the lift back, nothing. So, I searched in my bags for the fob, which I knew I had, but I could not find it. Panic began to set in. After too much wasted time running from the bridge info table who sent me to security who sent me back to the info table who sent me to another security man, I went back to the garage to see if I had dropped the key fob. I could not find it, so I emptied my bags again in the dark corner where I had parked, thinking it had to be there. No fob. I dug and dug, freaking out more and finally found it zipped in another pocket. But the car still would not open. Dead. I called Bob, and [after he calmed me down] he talked me through taking the fob apart to find some hidden skinny key. It was so dark in the garage where I was that I was near tears running over to some sunlight, worried that I would be sleeping over on 4 East. I did get the fob apart, got back to the car to try the hidden key, and, for some reason, once I had the fob apart, all the lights went on and the car just opened. Then I worried that all batteries had died, but Bob kept telling me to start the car and it would be fine. It was. But then …this story has a better ending…I was still so rattled [77-year-old women should not navigate Providence traffic when they are rattled] that of course I kept missing turns directed by my robot-voice navigator who was trying to get me home. I missed route 6 back to 84, and I ended up on 146 north driving home by the MassPike. This route was an infinitely better route, as you suggested. I am sure I lost another three years of heart life, but at least I was not stuck in the garage overnight.
The nicest part of the fiasco was that your kind gift of the validation card worked like a charm, and it was great to have that bonus in all of the mess.

Monday July 18: My room on the third floor of the Crowne Plaza was very nice. The bathroom had two sinks! It was a good thing, too. The stopper on the main sink did not work. So, I shaved at the one on the end.

I have walked there, but I drove every day on this trip.

I drove to McDonald’s for my usual sausage biscuit with egg, a breakfast that I consumed six of the seven mornings of my stay at the Crowne Plaza, which does not offer free breakfasts. I ate the sandwick on the car while I drove on I-95.

I worked at the Partnership Desk on Monday morning. While I was there I espied Mike Heider’s missing convention card lying on the table. I took it over to Joe and left it with him. When I spotted Mike later that day I told him that I had found it and let him know where it was.

I assisted a few people looking for partners in understanding how the cards were displayed: teams on one board and pairs games on the other. Each board was sorted by day of the event. Usually that was all that was needed. A player would find someone of about his/her level and call them.

One fellow did not have a phone. I offered to let him use mine, but he had no idea how to use a smartphone. I had to dial the number for him. This process was repeated a few times.

Perhaps twenty-five minutes before 10:00, the starting time for all the games, Paul arrived at the Partnership Desk. To my surprise the ponytail for which he was renowned had disappeared. Shortly thereafter we saw Judy Hyde, with whom I have often been a partner or teammate and even more often an opponent. We talked for a bit, and both Paul and I came away certain that she had agreed to play in the Bracketed Round Robin Teams with us. Then she vanished to find her partner. We never saw her again.

At 9:59 Paul and I walked over to the Open Pairs game and registered. It was a nightmare. We were East-West in the morning, and we were between Robert Todd and his partner, who played a customized Big Club system, and a pair that played a Polish Club. The senior member of both of these pairs delivered a lengthy pre-alert speech explaining the unusual conventions that they used.

Thirteen rounds of listening to both of these dissertations would certainly have been enough to drive anyone to distraction. However, we had the completely unique distinction of playing North-South for the thirteen rounds in the afternoon session seated between the same two pairs. By the time that the last round had ended we could recite either speech with no pauses.

Paul played badly throughout, and I was worse. Our scores reflected it. Fortunately, he got to play with a different partner, his college roommate, Rob Stillman, on Tuesday. I, on the other hand, had already been planning on taking that day off.

The most amazing thing about our second session was that a guy with whom I had talked at The Graduate on the previous day came late to our table. On one of the two hands that we played against him he took at least—this is no exaggeration—five minutes to decide on a single play on defense. On every other trick he played in tempo. I suspect that he was astral traveling.

To add insult to injury Tom Gerchman came up to complain to me after the round was over that he was unable to obtain a parking pass. I simply said in a Chico voice “That’s not my chob.”

I picked up some tacos at the Taco Bell that was across the street from McDonald’s on Bald Hill Rd. in Warwick and consumed them in my room at the Crowne Plaza. Life is definitely romantic and exciting at bridge tournaments.

I was only slightly surprised to find that my room had not been made. Apparently that was the new normal, at least at chain hotels in Warwick.

I called Abhi Dutta and confirmed with him that Paul and I would team up with him and a young man named Jaan Srimurthy in the Bracketed Swiss on Wednesday.

Tuesday July 19: In 2019 I took a day off at the NABC in Honolulu, but that was only because my partner, Ann Hudson, refused to play with me any more.⁶ The idea of a voluntary respite was a new one.

The award was presented by Mark Aquino, the Regional Director.

I read the Daily Bulletin on the ACBL website. The first thing that I noticed was that Sue Miguel had been presented with a Special Goodwill award for her outstanding work with the Intermediate/Novice program in District 25 and at the two NABCs in Providence.

So, evidently I had missed another meeting of the Goodwill Committee. I have tried to attend them several times, but I have never succeeded.

I also searched the Bulletin for information about the number of COVID-19 cases that had been reported thus far, but the only reference was to the ACBL’s mask (not required) and vaccination (required) policies.

I went to IHOP and treated myself to a ham and Swiss-cheese omelette with pancakes. They were as good as I remembered. I was disappointed that the restaurant no longer played oldies on the intercom system.

Two very old ladies⁷ sat across the aisle from me. I could not avoid listening to much of their conversation. One of them was treating the other to breakfast because it was her birthday. I was tempted to wish her a happy birthday, but I did not want to disturb their illusion of a private conversation.

After breakfast I called the front desk to ask about the housekeeping regimen. They told me that they would bring me more linens. That afternoon a large bag appeared in my room. It contained towels.

On the way back to the hotel I stopped at Barnes & Noble and bought a copy of Interlibrary Loan, Gene Wolfe’s last book. It was a sequel to A Borrowed Man, which I had read a few years earlier. I only vaguely remembered the plot.

I then walked around the exterior of the hotel and then took advantage of the beautiful weather to read my new book while I sat on a bench for a half hour or so. Occasionally an employee would come out to smoke, but they stayed far enough away that it did not bother me. As I came back inside I saw Sally Kirtley and Helen Pawlowski. They were on site to check out the hotel for the regional tournament scheduled for the week before Labor Day. It would be held in the Crowne Plaza.

Helen asked me what I was doing there. I told her that I was staying at the Crowne Plaza and that I gave myself the day off after four days of frustration. She replied, “That makes sense.”

I then went up to my room and took a nap in my unmade bed. After I woke up I talked with Sue on the phone. I told her about how terrible the previous day had been.

Of course, I actually walked straight from the hotel’s door across the parking lot and field to the intersection of East Ave. and Greenwich Ave.

In the afternoon I walked to the Stop and Shop. The walk there was fairly easy. The only challenge was to cross East Ave., a major highway. There was a button to initiate the pedestrian crossing lights, but it only worked for the main part of the street. Crossing the entrance and exit required alertness and quickness.

At the grocery store I purchased a large roast beef grinder and four two-liter bottles of caffeine-free Diet Coke using my GO rewards card to qualify for the $4 price on the colas. The walk back was not quite as easy. I had brought a tote bag to carry the Cokes in, but I had to change it from one hand to the other several times. Eight liters weighs 17.6 pounds, and the burden was mostly borne by my fingers. I should have brought two bags; that would have been considerably easier.

When I got back to the hotel I slept for another hour. Then I ate half of the grinder and drank a considerable amount of Diet Coke for lunch/supper.

In the evening I read some more and fooled around with my laptop computer.

My plans for the last three days were still up in the air. I was scheduled to play with Sohail Hasan, but we did not have teammates lined up.

The report of the last five days of the tournament is a little more upbeat. It can be found here.

1. The fine printing on the bottom of each voucher clearly stated that only one could be used per entry, but I later realized that the directors did not enforce this limitation. They accepted as many vouchers as each person presented. I played in eighteen sessions at the tournament, but I spent very little cash on entry fees.

2. As of November 2022 I still had done nothing about the mirror. It has functioned admirably.

3. My inability to find things is legendary. It almost caused me to flunk first grade. That story was told here.

4. WaterFire was a spectacular event that was held periodically in Providence. It is difficult to describes. People rode in boats, and they used torches to light larger torches that are permanently in the water. I watched the event in October, 2014. On that occasion it was becoming dark by the time that the afternoon session ended, and volunteers had been stationed along the route from the RICC to the viewing area so that all the bridge players could find the event.

5. Towns and cities in New England felt under no obligation to provide street signs that identified every street at every intersection. I have complained about this since I first came to the area in 1972.

6. The adventures at that tournament and the week afterwards that we spent in Maui are documented here. Ann and I remained good friends, and I have played with her several times subsequently. She even volunteered to pick us up at the airport after we returned from Hawaii.

7. I long ago realized that women my age are very old.

2021 Part 2: The Pandemic Strikes Back

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Mike

Living with Covid-19 in 2021. Continue reading →

I kept pretty good records of what my activities during 2021. I decided to arrange this entry in chronological order with separate entries for a few startling or momentous events.

January: 2020 was widely considered the worst year ever or at least in my lifetime, but it appeared that 2021 might wrest that crown away. It had the usual 365 days, but it felt like the longest year of all time. I had rather enjoyed the tranquility of the isolation in 2020, but by January of 2021 I really wanted to play bridge and see all of my friends again on a regular basis.

During the first few days of the new year no one talked about anything besides the election. I had become convinced early in the election campaign that Trump would try to start a coup if he lost. I was right. That story has been told here.

On the Pandemic front the big news in late 2020 was that three different vaccines would soon be available, but the schedule had not been published. The priority would be given to health care workers and then to those over 65.

We sufferers from trypanophobia were relentlessly subjected to photos of people with their sleeves rolled up as someone near them administered the shot (or “jab” as they called it in England).

On January 1 I played bridge online with Ken Leopold. We scored over 65 percent, one of my best scores ever. I still did not enjoy it.

On January 4, my sister’s 65th birthday, both of the Democrats were declared winners in Georgia. The Democrats seemed to be in control of both houses of Congress, but two of them, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, were not reliable votes. The former was in bed with Big Coal and conservative for even a Blue Dog, and the latter was just a narcissist.

On January 6 I played bridge with Ken again. This time we did horribly. When I get nervous playing online (sometimes because I am not yet used to the BBO interface), my left hand begins to shake.

Almost none of the rioters that stormed the Capitol wore masks. Deaths from Covid-19 were still averaging 4,000 per year. So, on top of everything else the insurrection was also probably a super-spreader event.

Ken and I had another awful game on January 8. This time I had an excuse. While we were playing, Sue was in the other end of the house and had a heart attack. She called 911, and an ambulance took her to the emergency room of St. Francis hospital. The doctors put in a stent. In January of 2021 hospitals were a very dangerous place. I was quite worried. I had long known that a day like this might come. Sue was quite overweight, and she knew that she had a mild case of diabetes for a long time. She never exercised, and her eating and sleeping habits were deplorable.

Almost all my horror stories involved Unite.

Expedia sent me an email that said that I had a credit with United Airlines. I had absolutely no idea what caused this. I looked at the header for the email; it seemed legitimate. At that point it seemed pretty unlikely that I would ever fly on United again. Unfortunately, the email got lost when I cleaned out my Outlook folders before moving to the Asus computer (details here) in 2023. So, I probably will never know any more about this.

I drove Sue home from the hospital on January 11. For the rest of her life she was required to administer insulin shots to herself and to take several types of heart medicine and a few other drugs for other chronic issues. She was on a fairly strict diet aimed at getting her weight down and her blood-sugar level under control. She could walk without assistance, but she had no stamina. She seemed worse a couple of days later.

She made an appointment with her primary care physician. The appointment with the doctor seemed to go OK. There might have been an adjustment to her drugs. I was required to wake her up every morning at 9 a.m. and to remind her when it was 6 p.m. After a while she figured out how to give herself reminders on her phone, but I still needed to awaken her every morning.

On January 20 Joe Biden was sworn in peacefully. At this point some right-wingers were claiming (with no evidence whatever) that the rioters (or at least the instigators) were actually from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or even the FBI. The FBI had begun searching for participants. There was an unbelievable abundance of video. Evidently for a lot of these bozos this was the culmination of a great deal of training and effort, and they wanted to make sure that they had mementos. Many of them would come to regret that decision.

On the 23rd I wrote in my notes that Sue seemed a little better, but she was still quite weak. She said that she could cook some, but she requested that I do the dishes. I agreed, of course, and there were several delicious but easy meals that I was comfortable preparing and cooking. I shopped for them, and she learned how to order groceries online.

February: On February 5 I played on BBO with Eric Vogel. We scored better than 54 percent.

Sue has rehabilitation therapy scheduled for the 8th, but she canceled it. She did that a lot when she had her knee replacement surgery a few years earlier. For a little while she tried to walk around on Hamilton Court. I joined her for a few of these jaunts. The cold air bothered her breathing for some reason. When it got warmer she went on little walks by herself, but she eventually stopped doing them. That was just the way she was. It would have done no good to nag her to exercise.

On the next day I played with Eric again. This time we scored better than 57 percent. I was starting to feel more relaxed playing online, but I still hated it. It was also the day that Trump’s trial in the Senate began. The first vote was on whether the process was constitutional. That passed 56-44 with six Republicans voting in favor. However, 67 votes will be required for conviction, and so it appears that he will walk again.

On the 10th Sue went back to her heart doctor. He put her back on Lasix to reduce the buildup of fluids. This seemed to help her a lot, but it made her go to the bathroom. It took her a bit of time to learn how to control this situation.

On the same day I went downstairs to walk a few miles on the treadmill¹. It made a horrible sound, and I had to unplug it. After I thought about it, I became pretty sure that this was caused by the cats, Giacomo and Bob. They both took naps on the treadmill after visiting the litter box, which was also in the basement. A bit of litter might have stuck to their paws, then fell into the treadmill’s mechanism, and somehow made it jam up. In any case fixing or replacing it was not a job to be undertaken when all of society was under lockdown.

I always watched an opera or a streamed TV show or movie on my laptop situated on the ping pong table.

On the very next day I spent 100 minutes on the rowing machine that Sue had bought for me many years earlier. It gave me a sore tailbone. I brought down a small pillow and strapped it on top of the seat. I also brought down a pair of grey sneakers and permanently tied them into the footrest. It had bothered me that my feet slipped while I was rowing. This solved the problem.

Sue at some point in February had an anxiety attack. This was really the worst symptom yet. She had difficulty breathing for several minutes. This development meant that I had to keep bottled up my feelings about everything (including but not limited to my disdain for the pigsty in which we lived) or risk killing my wife. She got a prescription for this from one of her doctors. It seemed to work.

Over the next few days I spent some time doing our income taxes. I filed them electronically using “Free File Fillable Forms” and almost immediately received a refund from Connecticut. The federal refund did not arrive for several months. I can’t complain too much; the IRS did send a “stimulus” check of $2800.

At some point I dropped my Pixel 2 cellphone and cracked the screen. It still seemed to function correctly. This device, which I came to hate, continued to function until May of 2022. Its demise occurred somewhere in Germany and was described in detail here.

March: The 2nd was Sue’s 70th birthday. She was planning on throwing a big party, but she was definitely not up to it, and not many people would have been able to come anyway.

On March 15 Sue and I drove to a huge parking lot on Runway Rd. in East Hartford. There we received our initial Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine. It was a very quick and well-organized process overseen by members of the National Guard. The vaccine was reportedly more than 90 percent effective, which was incredibly high for a vaccine of any time. The number of new cases was already dropping in response to its availability.

A meeting of the District 25 Executive Committee (EC) was held via Zoom. Not much was decided. The big issue was whether the district would follow the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the locality, or nobody with regards to requirements for vaccination and/or masks.

On March 16 the weather was nice enough to walk five miles outside. However this was the last time in March that I was able to achieve that distance. Subsequent walks were cut short by pain in my right foot that seemed somehow to be related to the chronic tendinitis that I had in the IT band that ran from my knee to my hip (described here). This was quite upsetting to me.

On March 21 I posted the pre-registration form and deposit for our team for the Grand National Teams (GNT) qualifying tournament: Felix Springer, Trevor Reeves, Ken, and me. The qualifying games would definitely be held online on BBO. The national finals were scheduled for the summer NABC. Because that tournament had been canceled, the GNT finals would be held online.

On March 22 the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) met on Zoom. The plan was to hold the Ocean State Regional in Warwick on the week before Labor Day, if possible. The ACBL was planning to make a decision about sanctioning tournaments on May 22.

On the last day of March I made a long overdue appointment with my dentist, Dr. Coombs in Suffield. I later canceled the appointment because of fear of Covid-19.

April: No April fool jokes on April 1: The last blossom on the Christmas cactus appeared. The most remarkable story of the year concerned the mysterious injury to Sue’s cat, Bob. The details have been posted here.

April 5: I sent out an email composed by Sue Miguel to promote the online GNT qualifying tournaments that will be held at various times.

April 7: Bob seems nearly fully recovered.

April 13: Frances Schneider, the outgoing president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) asks me to take over her job at the end of her term. I declined because I was still doing a great deal of work for the district, and no one seemed to be taking seriously that I planned to resign those duties at the end of the year, and a great deal of effort would be required to replace me.

April 15: Sue and I drove back to East Hartford to be given the second Pfizer shot. I was once again amazed at how easy it was. I have always absolutely hated even the idea of shots, but this was not a bad experience. A fairly sizeable percentage of the population, however, has bought into the idea that the vaccines are some kind of plot generated by the Big State.

April 17-18: The GNT qualifier was held over a weekend online on BBO. In the first round on Saturday our foursome played in a four-way, which was necessary because there was no way to do a three-way on BBO. Because it was so easy to cheat on BBO, we were supposed to provide our own way of communicating visually (via Zoom or some other device). There were no instructions as to how this should or could be done. It was left up to the players, each of whom was paired up with an opponent in the way that is done in matches that used screens. .

The Meyerson team. Bernie is on the right.

In the first half of the first round we met Steve Meyerson’s team for a twelve-board match. I was supposed to set up some kind of communication with Bernie Bendiksen. I had played against Bernie a few times at tournaments, but I did not know him well. He didn’t know how to do it, and neither did I. So, we just played. I think that the other six people figured out a way to do it.

We won easily. The margin was 30 victory points. That meant that we did not need to play in the second half of the first round. We did not need to come back until after lunch.

Meyerson’s team won the second half of the morning. So, they got to play in the second round after the lunch break

In the afternoon we had another four-way. In the first twelve-board match our opponents were the team captained by Dana Rossi, who was also the person with whom I was supposed to establish verbal communication. Dana was from southwest Connecticut; I had played against him quite a few times at sectionals, but I had never been friendly with him. He provided me with a link to a Zoom feed that he was controlling. I signed in on Yoga, my convertible laptop. I played the match online on my desktop computer. I was uncomfortable listening to Dana Russo talking to a little girl, presumably his daughter. He told her that they take dead animals to the incinerator to burn them.

We won again, this time by 35 victory points. So, we qualified to play in the quarterfinals on Sunday. We were matched up against Brad Mampe’s team. I was paired with his long-time partner Steve Willner. I had played against them once or twice, but I had not conversed with either of them. They seemed to play very little except in this event. Steve ran the Zoom feed. They had previously played a version of the Polish Club (as, in fact, so had Dan and his partner, Adam Lally). In this match they played a fairly standard version of 2/1.

This was a twenty-four board match. We lost the first half by 11 victory points. Steve was not around when the second half began, but he showed up a few minutes later. Ken and I had some chances in the second hand, but we each misplayed one hand. We lost the second half by 24.

The Mampe team defeated the team captained by Dan Jablonski in the semifinals. Their opponents in the final match would be the Xiao team, whose captain was Victor. They would play a 48-board match for first place at some later date, but they were both guaranteed to qualify for the GNT.

On April 19 I sent out another email on MailChimp for Sue Miguel. When I attempted to remove everyone from the audience that I was using so that I could replace them with C players, Donna Cone’s record did not move. In an online “chat” someone from MailChimp told me it was because her record had been “cleaned”, which meant that the email address was no longer valid. I had obtained this address from the Rhode Island Bridge Association (RIBA) several years earlier.

After I sent out the email I undertook to print a coupon for $3 off of a box of cat litter. Thus began the great encounter with the Geek Squad that has been recounted in detail here.

On April 24 I walked 2.5 miles, but I had to quit at that point because of the pain in my right foot. The pain persisted throughout the evening.

The next day I sent out another email for Sue Miguel.

On April 26 I listened to a very disturbing podcast on This American Life about how right-wingers are sabotaging the effort to get the nation to a state of “herd immunity”, in which enough people have immunity that new infections cannot find new hosts. It has been posted here.

May: On May 2 I sent the following email to my friend, Bob Sagor (introduced here), the captain of the team that finished third: “The Xiaos won C. They can’t play in both flights. You may get to play in the NABC!”

On Thursday, May 6, I mowed the lawn for the first time in 2024. As usual, the Honda lawnmower started on the first or second pull. I needed to stop after completing the parts of the yard that face Hamilton Court or North Street. I sat, stretched the IT band on my right leg, and rested a bit. I then mowed the rest of the lawn.

The flowers on the daffodils and tulips in the neighborhood were withering. New Englanders said that the plants were “going by.” I had never heard this expression before coming to Connecticut, and I have never seen it in print.

On May 8 Brad Mampe’s team beat Victor Xiao’s team in the final match of the Flight B qualifying tournament by 50 Victory Points! The third-place match was won by the team thrown together at the last minute by my friend and occasional partner, Bob Sagor. In fact, Bob’s team did attend the tournament, which was held online. They added Felix to their roster.

On May 11 Sue somehow hurt her left foot. I gave her the ankle brace that I had used a couple of times when I had sprained my ankle. Also, her ears were stopped up. Neither of these conditions lasted very long, but they made her even more miserable.

On May 13 I walked five miles with only two stretch breaks in 70 degree weather. I considered that a big improvement! Giacomo was having trouble getting up the steps from the basement to the house. I hated to do it, but I was going to need to bring the litter box upstairs.

The was the day that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) eliminated the mask guidelines “for most”. This was strictly a political move. Hundreds were still dying every day, but an incredibly large number of people resented being told to wear them. Good masks were an effective means of reducing the spread of the virus. The CDC had fumbled the ball when they said that any sort of face covering would do. Only later did their spokesmen indicate that the N95 masks were many times more effective than ordinary cotton ones.

On Wednesday, May 26, I had placed my convertible computer, Yoga, on the floor next to the nightstand in the bedroom just before I took a nap. I then set my Big Bubba mug on the nightstand. It fell on the computer. Even though Yoga was closed, the impact cracked the screen. It was no longer functional.

Two days later I ordered a Microsoft Surface Go laptop from Best Buy. Before the Pandemic there was a Best Buy store in Enfield, but it had been closed. I had to drive to Manchester, CT, to pick it up. I did not give it a name.

On May 31 the Hartford Bridge Club reopened. Eight pairs played in a Howell. Masks were required (thank goodness!) because of the policy of West Hartford.

June: On the first day of the new month my new laptop would not operate. The screen was all black or dark grey. I could see the cursor, but i could not get it to operate. I made an appointment and drove to Best Buy in Manchester. The guy at the Geek squad desk was sanguine. He told me that “It uploads changes every Tuesday; something must have happened so that it could not reboot.” I asked him if I should make an appointment now for the following Wednesday. He advised me to hold the power key, which was the second one from the right on the top row, down for ten seconds.

On June 3 the TSC had a Zoom meeting. The district will try to hold a tournament in the week before Labor Day in Warwick, RI. This was exciting news. I sent out three big emails about Warwick.

That evening I found Bob in the basement. I deduced that he was able to climb up and down the stairs. I moved the litter box back to the basement.

Sohail Hasan, a partner from a tournament in 2019, sent me an email that asked me to play with him in Warwick.

On June 5 Chen’s team beat Mampe’s in a close match in the Flight A final of the GNT qualifier. That would really have been something if Mampe’s team had won both A and B.

The internal modem on my desktop computer stopped working, but I got the Belkin external modem to function. 52 people unsubscribed to my emails. That was a very high number. It was 94 degrees outside that day. I found that I could no longer tolerate long walks in temperatures above 90. When I was in my fifties I had no problems running in 100+ temperatures. It was still very hot the next day.

Sue told me that she has seen a white circle in the middle of her field of vision twice. This could be very bad. I certainly hoped that it didn’t happen again.

On June 8 I committed to play on July 1 with Felix Springer at the Hartford Bridge Club. I needed to avoid getting too many masterpoints because my total was very close to 2500, which was the cutoff for the GNT in 2022. I needed to be under that total for the roster that was published on August 6, 2021.

While researching for the blog entry about the Mark Twain writing contest (posted here), I discovered that Dorothy Clark was one of the judges. I played against her many times in Simsbury, and I was also her partner one evening, as described here.

June 12th was my third straight day of pain-free five mile hikes. I committed to play on 6/21 with Eric Vogel in club qualifying game for the North American Pairs (NAP).

The next day I committed to play at the HBC with Trevor Reeves on June 29. That game got canceled later.

On June 14 I discovered that Sue’s cat, Bob, was able to use the ramp that led from the basement to the cat door and thence to the back yard. So, he evidently no longer needed the litter box.

I played with Eric online on June 21. We were horrible.

I learned on June 27 that I did not need to report for jury duty. In 2023 I would be 75, which would allow me to avoid jury duty forever. I never served on a jury. I came close once. I was selected as an alternate for a civil case about an automobile accident. It was scheduled for two days, but one of those was canceled because of a bomb threat. I was unable to attend on the rescheduling date, and so I was excused.

6/29 Bob Bertoni (introduced here) died at 5:45 AM. This was very hard to take. Bridge in New England will have a very difficult time recovering without him. Over the subsequent years I have thought of him very often. His obituary was posted here.

Sue played bridge at the HBC with John Willoughby. After the temperature topped out at 97 degrees, a front came through with a thunderstorm.

6/30 I played with Felix at club. There were nine tables. We won with 62+%, and I earned my Q for the NAP qualifier.

July: A lot happened in July. On the first Sue and I drove to Bradford, MA, for Bob Bertoni’s wake. I had to let Sue off and park several blocks away. I saw Peter, Lois DeBlois, Carolyn Weiser, and Paula Najarian, who, to my great surprise, had white hair. A lot of the bridge players from the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA) were also there. I introduced myself to Beth Bertoni and told her that I did not know what we were going to do without Bob. I really meant it, and in the ensuing months and years I learned that my concern was justified.

Sad news: O’Connor’s closed for good at the end of 2022.

On the way back to Enfield we stopped for supper at O’Connor’s Irish restaurant in Worcester. I had to let Sue off again before I found a parking sport a good way from the door. This was our first night out in over fifteen months. We wore masks until the food came. Most of the other diners acted as if the Pandemic had never happened.

Mrs. Brown’s giant chicken and vegetable pot pie.

I had the chicken pot pie and a Guiness. It was good, but not a lot better than what could be purchased at the grocery store and reheated. It was nice, however, to be in public and see people who were having a good time.

It was raining lightly when I walked out to retrieve the car. By the time that we reached the Mass Pike there were torrents of rain. I drove almost all thee way home with the windshield wipers on at the highest speed. Most of the time I had great difficulty seeing the lane indicators. This was the worst occasion for summertime driving that I ever experienced.

It continued to rain very hard on the next day. Enfield seemed to get more rain than nearby locations. The back yard was flooded, and a few puddles were evident in the basement. Never in the more than thirty years that we had lived in Enfield had water seeped into the basement. I struggled to understand where it came from. Evidently concrete is slightly porous, and when the soil is very wet the water finds its own level.

Sue borrowed (or otherwise procured) a Sears Wet/Dry Vacuum and showed me how to use it. The puddles were eliminated rather quickly.

On July 9 Saul Agranoff asked me if I could help with the EMBA website. It had been designed and supported by Bob Bertoni. I supplied him with the email address of the contact person at Bob’s company, Megahertz Computer. I also explained that I had never worked on the EMBA website, had no credentials for it, and was pretty certain that it was significantly different from NEBridge.org.

On July 10 I received emails from District 25 officials who were concerned about new ACBL rules for tournaments. They evidently required masks on all players and a distance of nine feet between tables.

My notes said that on the next day the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) announced a sectional in Stamford. I could find no details about when this was scheduled to occur. This struck me as very peculiar because I was a member of the board in 2021 (and the previous eight years). To my knowledge we had no meetings whatever during the Pandemic.

My notes also indicated that on the next day that I sent email to my steady partners. Because a large number of emails were deleted when I converted to the Asus box in the fall of 2023 (described here), I cannot locate a copy of this email, but my recollection is that I wanted to set up a regular schedule for online play at the HBC on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

On July 13 I played bridge at the H

I kept a couple of these masks to use while mowing my lawn in allergy season.

BC with Felix. Quite a few players had difficulties with the masks. The most common complaint was that they caused glasses to fog up. I had bought ten masks for $10 at Shoprite. They were sold by Hanes and made of cotton and were washable. They probably stopped not even one infected particulate, but they did not bother me even a little.

Ben and Ginny Bishop provided decorated masks for members of the HBC. Sue ordered one. I don’t know what happened to it.

On July 15 I renamed the blog entries that chronicled the story of my life as The 1948 Project. It was a takeoff on the somewhat controversial 1619 Project that was sponsored by the New York Times in 2019 concerning the role of slavery in the development of the United states.

On the same day a $63.75 charge from Slice appeared on my American Express card. This was for three pizzas that the cellphone that was in my pocket apparently ordered while I was on one of my five-mile walks. The pizzas were delivered, but I had refused them because I did not place or confirm the order.

In an open pairs game at the HBC on July 20 Donna Lyons (introduced here) and I scored 62%. It was Maria Van der Ree’s 90^th birthday.

On July 22 I played at the HBC with Joan Brault (introduced here). There were a lot of wild hands. Joan and I did not deal with them very well.

On July 24 Sue and I attended Maria’s birthday party. We found the event somewhat scary. No one was wearing masks. People had had enough of Covid-19, but the threat was a very long way from over.

Ken Leopold’s teenage son Sam had died at some point in July. I never learned the details. Sue and I attended the burial service in Avon. It was the first Jewish burial service that I had attended. A few people from the HBC were there: Ronit Shoham, Geof Brod, Y.L. Shiue, Marie Abate, and Felix Springer and his wife Helene. Ken gave a very touching speech about his son’s baseball heroics.

The virus had been raising its ugly head. On July 30 the ACBL responded by canceling all tournaments scheduled for August, which included the tournament that D25 hoped to old in Warwick. I immediately sent out an email with the same selection criteria as the on that I had previously sent to announce the cancellation of the tournament.

August: On August 2 I received an email from Viking (the cruise line) moving the departure date for our Grand European Tour to October 23. That would preclude attendance at the scheduled tournament in Mansfield, MA. I began investigating the alternatives.

My notes for August 5 say “Stood up by Joan. Had to drive back to pick up Sue Rudd.” I do not remember either of those events or what caused them. American Express reinstated the charges for the pizzas. I called, and they reopened the dispute. In the end I had to pay for one pizza. It was not worth it to fight this any more, but I deleted the Slice app from the Pixel 2. I have told this story many times, and I have yet to meet anyone else whose phone ordered anything for them.

After a Zoom call in the evening with Mark Aquino, who, after Bob Bertoni’s death, had decided to run for Regional Director, I felt very depressed about the future of bridge in New England and elsewhere.

On August 6 I rebooked the Viking tour to depart on October 11.

On the next day on behalf of Brenda Montague, the chair of the Nominating Committee, I sent out a set of emails to bridge players in New England soliciting volunteers for the job of vice-president. Trevor Reeves later talked with me about the possibility of applying. I don’t think that he went through with it.

On August 11 I attended the Zoom call with the three Regional Director candidates, David Moss, Mark Aquino, and Allan Graves. David was the District 24 Director from New York City. Allan Graves lived in St. Johnsbury, VT, but for years had only participated in NABC’s and international events. No one mentioned the word tournament. Allan argued that we should concentrate our efforts on trying to get people to play rubber bridge. I found the whole event very depressing.

After the bridge game on my 73^rd birthday a bunch of people who had played in the game joined Sue and me for lunch at Effie’s Place. In attendance were Lea Selig, Susan Seckinger, Lois McOmber, Jeanne Striefler, Maria Van der Ree, and Fred Gagnon. We ate outside. I think that I had a Reuben sandwich. It was nice to have any kind of a social occasion.

The next day a “war room” Zoom meeting of D25 officials was held. Carole Weinstein, Carolyn Weiser, Jack Mahoney, Peter Marcus, Sue Miguel, Joe Brouillard, and Sally Kirtley atttended. Peter wanted D25 to cancel all tournaments for 2021 and 2022! Nobody took that suggestion seriously. The qualification tournaments for the NAP would be held online. Carole called the decision a “no-brainer”. I thought that it was a bad idea to decide that anything would be played online if an alternative was possible.

On August 19 I reluctantly voted for Mark Aquino for Regional Director. He won.

I learned on August 20 that airline reservations had been made by Viking for the trip in October. I started doing some serious research about the ports of call on the cruise, which would start in Amsterdam and end in Budapest.

SBC games were played at Eno Hall, the Simsbury Senior Center.

On August 21 I sent an email to players in the vicinity of Simsbury to determine whether they would be interested in resuming the games of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). It is posted here. I received a lot of positive responses.

The next day Hurricane Henri passed through Connecticut. Enfield received only a little bit of rain, but floods were reported in Vernon and Manchester.

On August 24 I learned that the SBC will have been turned over to Sally Kirtley as of September 15. Ken did not want to direct the games. I asked her to verify the schedule with Eno Hall before I announced it.

On August 25 I sent an email to SBC subscribers that we would not be allowed to validate vaccinations on site. I definitely did not want to play bridge with anyone who had not been vaccinated.

On August 30 Med Colket came up with a work-around. We could change SBC games to invitational instead of open so that I could validate vaccinations that were sent to me through emails. I could also automatically register players whom I had seen play at the HBC.

Aaaaargh! The U.S. has been removed from the white list by the European Union because of the recent uptick in the number of Covid-19 cases here. I began to wonder whether the cruise would be called off and, if not, whether we would be quarantined before boarding the ship.

September: On the first day of the month tropical depression Ida arrived in CT late at night. The rest of this heroic story has been told here.

On September 3 three European countries (Norway, Sweden, and Italy) began requiring tourists from the U.S. to quarantine. The problem was the new Delta variant was nearly twice as transmissible as the original strain, which had spread at an incredible rate before the vaccinations began. .

On September 5 the leaders of D25 were considering—via an exchange of emails—whether to cancel the tournament in Mansfield in November. Most people seem to be leaning in that direction.

On the following day Tom Corcoran, Sue and I decided to postpone the cruise until the spring because of the threat of quarantining in Europe. This would also allow Tom to spend his 70th birthday with his family in Vermont.

On August 8 the cruise was changed to begin on May 5 and end on May 22. Sue made the arrangements while I was playing bridge at the HBC. This period was chosen because no bridge tournaments were scheduled then. The new cruise started in Budapest and ended in Amsterdam. The other ports were the same or nearly so. This was not the last change in our plans, but I actually did go on the cruise on those dates. The bizarre details have been posted here.

On September 10 the HBC restarted the Saturday afternoon game. Peter Katz, my long-time Saturday partner, agreed to play with me.

On September 10 Sue and I went to the picnic for the Locke cousins. I sat by myself because I heard that some of the attendees had refused to get vaccinated, and no one in attendance wore a mask.

On September 14 for the first time ever my Honda lawnmower would not start. I later learn that there was gas or oil in the air filter. On the next day it started, and Sue hired a local guy to pick it up, change the oil, and check it out.

The inaugural Friday afternoon open game at HBC on September 17 drew only six pairs. I played with Trevor.

On the next day the first Saturday afternoon game at the reopened HBC was held. Both Mike and Susan Smith and Ken and Lori Leopold attended. There were five tables.

On September 20 I learned that changing the date of the trip had cost Tom $3K. I did not understand why, but there was not much I could do about it.

Giacomo surprised me by climbing back up on the couch. In his younger days he nonchalantly walked up onto the couch. He also executed a very tentative “mighty leap”².

On September 21 the mechanic delivered the lawnmower and only charged $125. It ran very well. It was (and still is in 2024) the best lawnmower by far that I ever bought.

I realized on September 23 that I officially had exceeded my life expectancy at birth (73.1 years). I told people this at the HBC. No one seemed interested at all.

The cats had been acting weird for the last week or two. They no longer associated with each other. Bob stayed outside all day and night. He only came in only for meals or storms. Giacomo has returned to his throne on the back of the couch. He has taken to biting at his back legs and spine area. Who knows why?

On the same day the EC voted 9-3-1 to cancel Mansfield. I was the 1.

On September 24 the forecast on WTIC radio at 4:30 AM predicted a low of 75 and a high of 69.

The next day I discovered a sensitive spot on Giacomo’s back. For the first time ever he bit me.

On September 26 I was on the winning team of the first Swiss event at the reopened HBC. I played with Ann Hudson. Our teammates were Trevor, and Felix. We won by four victory points with a blitz in the last round against weak competition. I made made three bidding errors, but none of them cost us, and one helped us. 1♣-1♠-1NT-2♣–♥-2NT made 3; 2♣ by Ann was a relay to 2D (XYZ)³.Ann wanted to sign off in diamonds.

On September 27 I walked five miles without stopping for first time in months in perfect weather.

On September 30 I changed dentists because Dr. Peter Coombs did not take ConnectiCare. My new dentist was Dr. Bill Cummiskey.

October: On October 11 I canceled Chewy.com order of Advantage II, but it was delivered four days later. The charge was refunded on October 18.

On October 13 I saw Boris Godunov (an opera by Modest Mussorgsky recorded live in HD at the Met) at Cinemark⁴ at Enfield Square. Only one other person attended. Since that person was at least thirty feet away from me I took off my mask. I also saw two employees and one other person who was there to see a movie.

On October 15 I sent out the invitations for the first Simsbury game to 72 vaccinated people.

The next day Linda Starr helped me make boards at the HBC for the first game at Simsbury. Peter Katz and I finished first. There were only five other pairs, but it was a strong field. So far 4.5 tables are committed for the first game at the SBC.

On October 19 I got the points that I needed to finally make Gold Life Master even though I played poorly with John Calderbank.

Sally Kirtley set me an email that Eno “cannot accommodate SBC” on October 20. I had to postpone the first game, for which we had five tables.This was hard to take.

On October 20 I checked to make sure that everyone saw my email about the cancellation. Felix and Trevor agreed to play with Ken and me in the GNT qualifier next spring. HBC announced that it will drop mask requirement as of Friday. I had absolutely no intention of abandoning my mask.

On October 22 I discovered that Bob had a bump on his right shoulder that he did not like being touched. Sue was convinced that it was a bite. It did not feel like that to me.

I played with Sally Kirtley and learned that Eno Hall canceled our game because it did not have a janitor scheduled for October 20. Eight pairs had so far agreed to play on October 27.

On October 24 the HBC held its annual meeting on Zoom. Trevor had asked me to serve as a trustee, and I had agreed to a three-year commitment.

On October 27 Donna Feir let us use the boards that were made for the Tuesday night that was canceled because not enough people registered. It was Tom Corcoran’s birthday. Sue and I talked with him and his kids on Zoom. I copied the wrong .pbn⁵ file onto my thumb drive to give to Sally. I was ten minutes late at Simsbury because of Sue Rudd. Ken and I tied for first (out of eleven pairs) with Felix and Trevor.

On October 29 I discovered that Bob had one or two ticks.

November: We assigned November 1 as the birth date for two of our cats, Giacomo, and Woodrow. So, we celebrated Giacomo’s eighteenth birthday on 11/01/21. This was a big one. Both Woodrow and Rocky had made it to 18, but each died shortly thereafter. So, from now on Giacomo was playing with the house’s money.

In other cat news: Bob would not come into the house. Sue put food and water in bowls outside for him and made up a bed for him among all of her junk piled up outside of the blue door to the kitchen. Maybe he was afraid of Giacomo. Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe he was just crazy.

On Tuesday, November 2. I drove into the HBC before the morning game and used the HBC’s dealing machine to make boards for the SBC game the next evening. John Calderbank and I then had a 59 percent game, a real coup for us.

I somehow managed to pull a huge tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. Sue claimed that he still had a smaller one on the left side of hs neck, but I had not seen it.

On Wednesday evening we had 3 1/2 tables at the evening game at the SBC. I had used the correct pbn file this time.

On November 6 the grey cat that sometimes roamed our neighborhood appeared. Bob stayed inside.

On November 7 an astounding sixteen teams played in the Swiss at the HBC! Food was provided, and the players were definitely ready to party.

I picked a second tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. I could not find anything on his left shoulder. This might have been the best day of the year at the Wavada household.

On November 12 Bob returned to the family. He got up on Sue’s chair without help while she was sitting on it. Sue was absolutely delighted.

On November 23 the first meeting of the new HBC Planning Committee was held on Zoom. John Willoughby, the new vice-president, ran the meeting. I learned that there would be a “rainbow” event for clubs in January. Gold, silver, red, and black points would be awarded ⁶

Sue has taken to sleeping on my chair in the living room because Bob would not leave her chair. Why, you may ask, does she sleep prefer to sleep on a chair rather than a bed?

On November 24 I sent a long email to the people on the EC to explain what I had been doing in my role as webmaster, database manager, and other things before the Pandemic. The rest of my frustrating but ultimately successful attempt to resign from these responsibilities has been described here in excruciating detail.

November 27 was another great day. U-M defeated Ohio State 42-27. Michigan had no takeaways and only punted twice. They had seven drives that ended in touchdowns. Needless to say, I did not watch the game, but I wished that I had. I feasted on lots of replays of the many highlights. Michigan finished the regular season 11-1 and would meet Iowa on December 4 for the conference championship.

11/29 For some stupid reason the TSC announced that it would meet on Zoom on December 15, a Wednesday evening. My protests that this was the ONLY time all week that Sally and I could not attend fell on deaf ears. I don’t know if Sally emphasized this, but I certainly did. was really upset about this.

December: Sue and I got our booster shots for the Pfizer vaccine at the local CVS.

12/3 I had a minor pain in my shoulder and neck; the only reason to mention it was because I had no known injuries there. The passport that I planned to use on the October trip would expire before I needed it for the rescheduled one in May. I had researched what was required. I took a photo of myself in the size and format required. I mailed it with all the other materials, including my old passport. The State Department did not accept the photo and sent the package back to me.

On the next day Michigan beat Iowa 42-3. The Wolverines were champions of the Big 10 for the first time since they started the championship game.

On December 6 the new stove that Sue purchased arrived and was installed. The burners are, in my opinion, much too hot, but I didn’t know what we could do about it. My neck felt much better.

12/7 I went to Walgreen’s and bought a new passport photo. They guaranteed that it would be accepted. Evidently there was a website that examined the image and validated it. I could not find my old passport.

The next day I found the old passport under my chair in living room. It had apparently dropped through the cushions. I mailed the forms back in.

Ken and I scored more than 72 percent at the SBC bridge game. That might have been the best score that I had ever recorded up to that point.

The space to the right of the Gold LM certificate will probably always be empty.

On December 10 I received Gold LM certificate from the ACBL and attached it to the east wall in my office below the other ones. I don’t expect to win any more

On the next Tuesday Donna Feir needed me to make boards for the morning open pairs game while she got the room set up. I did so. I only had time to make 5 boards for the Wednesday night game at the SBC. I made the rest of boards by hand. Unfortunately, when I did so I made boards #21 and 22 the same. Ken directed and Margie Garilli kept score on the BridgeMate.

On December 16 the EC voted on Zoom to move the Royal STaC to April of 2022, to cancel the Presidential Regional ordinarily held in February, and to hold two four-day regionals in May. One would be a free tournament structured along the lines of the Gold Mine held in 2019⁷. The other would be open.

On December 17 President Biden postponed closing U.S airports to people from countries that were infected by the Omicron virus.

On December 22 I could not get dealing machine to work. At the SBC game we played using an old deck that had been given to me years earlier. The players did not like this much.

In the little shelf on the north wall of my office I found a package of McCormick’s Meat Marinade. On Christmas day I used it to marinate a spoon roast that Sue and I feasted on. I put Bob up on my lap both in the office and the living room. He really liked the former when I petted him with both hands, but I was not able to get much work done when I did so.

By December 26 Omicron accounted for 71 percent of the cases of Covid-19 in the US. The number of new cases eclipsed 200,000 per day. The holiday season turned into a super-spreader event.

I realized that I must be allergic to Bob—sneezing and blowing nose all day. I bought ten N95 masks at Home Depot for $23. The CDC finally admitted that simple face coverings were better than nothing, but the N95 masks were tremendously more effect

I encountered no problems whatever in making thee boards for the SBC game. I played with Felix in the open pairs game at the HBC. We almost won; one different decision against Tom Joyce would have done it.

On December 29 I had a 64 percent game in the open pairs at the HBC with Eric. In the last game of the year at the SBC 3 tables, Ken and I scored 65%.

On December 30 at an emergency meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) on Zoom. Carole Amaio was a riot: “Can you hear me? I broke my wine glass. Shit!” We decided to require masks starting on Monday.

On December 31 over 500,000 new cases were reported, the most of entire Pandemic. The only good sign was the fact that hospitalizations and deaths were not as prevalent as with the original virus. However, both vaccinated people and those who had already had Covid-19 were susceptible to Omicron.

U-M lost to Georgia 38-11. The football team had a great year, but they were not (yet) in Georgia’s class. Four bowl games were canceled in 2021.

1. This treadmill was given to me by Tom Corcoran. My first treadmill was purchased second-hand from someone who had never used it. I found them on Craig’s List. The belt on that one broke after I had used it regularly in the winter and foul weather for several years. Tom brought the second one from his house in Wethersfield. His wife Patti had used it for a while. He somehow arranged for removal of the old one and installation of this much better one. Incidentally, I claim to be the only person who has ever broken two treadmills. Prove me wrong.

2. Giacomo was the only cat that we ever had who attempted to make the “mighty leap” from the couch on which he tended to spend his days to my easy chair where he liked to sit on my lap while I was watching television. When in September 2021 he executed the “tentative” version of the leap, I realized that his legs and body were so long that he could actually reach the armrest that he landed on by just stretching out to his full length.

3. XYZ is a kind of new-minor forcing. After any three bids 2♣ is a relay to 2♦, usually to show invitational values. A ♦ rebid is an artificial game-force.

4. In December of 2023 the twelve-theater Cinemark complex in Enfield Square closed for good. At that point it became a twenty-minute drive to see a movie or, in my case,an HD opera.

5. Files with the extension “.pbn” (portable bridge notation) can be read by the Dealer4 software that runs the dealing machine at the HBC. At first I had Linda make some of these files for me using software on the HBC’s computer. In 2023 I discovered free software available for download that allowed me to make them on my computer. In both cases the files generated were completely random.

6. I am pretty sure that the “rainbow” event was later called a Royal STaC.

7. The free Gold Mine never happened. I do not remember why.

2020 Part 1: Pandemic Wars

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Mike

Life in 2020 after Covid-19. Continue reading →

The Worst Year Ever?: The virus seemed to appear in or around Wuhan, China, in late 2019. It appeared to be extremely contagious. It was given the name COVID-19¹ on February 11, 2020. In the past such scares (SARS and Ebola) had pretty much bypassed the West, but within two weeks Italy had become a global hotspot. China, South Korea, and New Zealand fought the disease relentlessly, and had very good results. If all other countries had done the same, the disease probably would have run its course in a few months. However, because in many cases the disease had mild or even undetectable symptoms, many people did not take it seriously and were scornful of those who did.

Editorial note: I have decided to capitalize Pandemic as a sign of respect. There have been other pandemics in my lifetime, but Covid-19 was the only one that had a significant effect on the U.S.

Cases began appearing in the U.S. in early February. The first death was reported in the state of Washington on the 29^th. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Two days later the Trump administration declared a national emergency and issued a travel ban from 26 non-European countries. However, the ban only applied to people who were not U.S. citizens. Need I add that this was an election year?

On Sunday March 15 Felix Springer and I played in a STaC game at the Hartford Bridge Club. The talk that day was largely about Colorado Springs, where a woman who had played in a sectional tournament may have been a super-spreader. She competed in the Bridge Center there in six events between February 27 and March 3. She died on March 13.

I later learned that Fred Gagnon had played in the same tournament, but he never was at the same table with her. Before the Pandemic struck Fred played both in Simsbury and Hartford and frequently partnered with my wife Sue. Details about the Colorado Springs incident can be found here.

New York and its suburbs were hit hard very early. While attending a large gathering at a synagogue in Rob and Laura Petrie’s hometown of New Rochelle, a man who had recently been abroad passed the disease on to many people, including the rabbi. At one time 108 of the state’s 173 cases were in Westchester County, which borders on Connecticut.

My notes about the bridge game at the HBC on March 15 record that despite some mistakes Felix and I won.² I remember that one woman who played that day wore a medical mask of some sort. We already knew that the club would be closed indefinitely after the game. Felix and I were the last two to leave the Bridge Center. He was responsible for locking up after we left. At the last minute I dashed over to the shelves that contained non-bridge books and selected Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz³ and Fatherland by Robert Harris. Both books resided in my house for much longer than I had planned, but I did eventually return them.

Sue and I had signed up for a bridge cruise on the Danube River with the famous expert, Larry Cohen. We were scheduled to leave on March 17. That cruise never happened. The details of the story are provided here.

Responding to the Pandemic: Although President Trump had declared a state of emergency, he, like most Republicans, absolutely refused to take the disease seriously. He made it clear that masks were not mandatory, and he refused to wear one. He then proceeded to make an utter ass of himself whenever he tried to talk about the Pandemic. He even predicted an “Easter miracle” that absolutely did not happen. Despite the fact that it was obviously an irresponsible if not evil idea, he actually encouraged everyone to go to church on that day.

Not only did this laissez-faire approach probably cost him the election; it also cost the country several hundred thousand lives. The Center for Disease Control also fumbled the ball. For some reason they refused to accept the test that had been developed by the World Health Organization, and their own test proved unreliable. So, for months as the virus spread geometrically throughout the country, the U.S. had no test. Soon the situation was much worse in America than anywhere else in the world.

To be fair Trump did direct more than a billion dollars to a virtually unknown company named BioNTech to develop a vaccine using mRNA technology. Others also were funded, but BioNTech received the biggest prize because its leaders claimed that with proper funding they could produce a new vaccine in a few months. Their effort was dubbed Project Lightspeed. Obviously Trump hoped that they would deliver by election day, but they missed by a few weeks. In fact, Pfizer, which did not participate, developed and tested a similar vaccine a little sooner, and the Chinese were already using a somewhat inferior vaccine by then.

Although most people who contracted the initial virus recovered after a week or so, the aged and those with comorbidities did not fare as well. The death rate in 2020 was over 3 percent. Nursing homes throughout the country often experienced horrendous situations. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly.

Of course, many people still had to work, but most of us hunkered down and stayed in our houses. We had to learn to order groceries—and anything else that we needed—online. I wrote a little program to allow members of the Simsbury Bridge Club to send me descriptions and/or pictures of their new lifestyle. I then posted them on a webpage that anyone could view. A few people sent responses, and I promptly posted them. You can view them here.

Reading: I also posted quite a few entries about my own life. I took advantage of the extra free time to read more. By June 28 I had read nine novels: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Magpie Murders, Fatherland, Supermarket by Bobby Hall, Moriarity by Anthony Horowitz, Two for Texas by James Lee Burke, The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, The Brothers K by David James Duncan, and Wayfaring Stranger by James Lee Burke. Supermarket, which I bought at a rare venture to the Target store, was awful. The others were all pretty good. The Enfield Public Library was closed. I purchased several books from Powell’s in Portland, OR. It took them almost a month for them to send them, but their selection of new and used volumes was outstanding.

What I especially liked about Powell’s was the number of books by Jack Vance that were offered for sale. I found some listed there that I had never seen in a library or bookstore, including the one that won an Edgar award for him, The Man in a Cage.

One of the last books that I later ordered from Powell’s was Jack Vance’s autobiography. Because I like a challenge—especially when I had an enormous amount of time on my hands—I selected the version in Italian, Ciao Sono Jack Vance! (E Questa Storia Sono Io). Vance has always been one of my favorite authors, and his last book was certainly one of his best. What a life he led! He managed to finish the book even though he was in poor health and nearly blind. He had to dictate the entire volume.

I was so inspired by this book that I decided to undertake this set of blog entries, which I later labeled The 1948 Project. The details surrounding its genesis have been recorded here.

Most aspects of life were put on hold in the spring and summer of 2020. The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) canceled all three of its national tournaments and prohibited its units and districts from holding tournaments for the rest of the year. The National Debate Tournament was also canceled. Hollywood closed shop.

Most schools attempted to reopen in the fall, but the result was a huge spike in the number of cases of COVID-19. The election was held in November, of course, but a very large number of people voted by mail rather than in person.

I walked southwest on North St. until it ended at Hazard Ave. (190). I turned left and walked west to Park St. Then a left on Elm St. I walked past Carris Reels to School St. and then north back to North St.

Exercise: I also exercised more during the lockdown. I was walking 35-40 miles per week, outside if the weather was tolerable, and on the treadmill when it wasn’t. On May 2 and a few other occasions I walked ten miles outside.

Later in the summer, however, I could no longer walk more than a mile or two without a pain gradually developing in the top of my right foot. This condition, which caused me to limp, bothered me throughout the year. I still walked, but I had to stop and stretch my IT band for a couple of minutes. Sometimes I would need to perform this ritual two or three times in a 2.5 mile lap. I often stopped after one lap. However, when I walked on the treadmill it hurt a lot less.

Therefore, I began to walk indoors more frequently. On my convertible laptop computer, a Lenovo model called Yoga, I watched many operas from the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming service that were new to me, including Ghosts of Versailles, La Wally, Orphée et Eurydice and many operas by Massenet and Bellini. I was really impressed by performances by Natalie Dessay, Teresa Stratas, and Marilyn Horn. The most bizarre moment occurred when Renée Fleming appeared in Rossini’s Armida. In a tender moment she rubbed cheeks with tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who happened to be black. When they parted more than a square inch of his brown makeup remained on her cheek.

I also watched operas on YouTube while I was walking on the treadmill. The quality was a little spotty—both the performances and the recordings. However, this introduced me to several of the more neglected operas, some of which were delightful.

The best thing about the YouTube operas was that I was able to make MP3 files of them using a piece of free downloadable software called MP3Studio. I had already made MP3 files out of my opera CD’s and downloaded them to a small MP3 player that I had purchased at Best Buy.⁴ I added quite a few operas from YouTube. My favorite was Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki. I liked it so much that I purchased a DVD of its performance at Covent Garden in London.

I also downloaded hundreds of great rock and roll songs of the sixties and seventies. I could scarcely believe that most of the best songs from Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were now available for free.

When I walked around the neighborhood I listened to music on the tiny MP3 play. In the cold weather I used my Bose headphones. When it was warmer I used ear buds.

My new and improved arch supports. The one on the right is inside-out.

Toward the end of the year I misplaced one of the arch supports that I had purchased from Walmart before the Pandemic. These were springy pieces of metal (I think) that were inserted into bands that wrapped around the foot and were secured by Velcro. I bought new ones at the same store that were spongy balls in elastic bands. They cost $10.

After I had used the new ones for about a month, the pain in my foot ceased, and I could walk five miles without stopping. I understand that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a famous fallacy, but I did not even consider reverting to the original pair when I discovered the hiding place of the lost arch support.

The Montalbano crew stayed together through all thirty-seven episodes.

I don’t remember how I heard about it, but on November 2 I subscribed (for only 8$ per month!) to a streaming service called MHz Choice. It had all thirty-seven of the Commissario Montalbano movies that I had learned about in 2016 in Sicily⁵ as well as dozens of other European mysteries and other offerings. All of them were captioned in English. I started with Montalbano (and a prequel called Young Montalbano), but I soon found many other shows that I enjoyed tremendously. There were also a few mysteries on YouTube, including the entire set of Inspector Morse shows.

During one of my walks around the neighborhood a bizarre event occurred. Just after I reached my house a car pulled into the driveway. It was driven by a man carrying three large cheese pizzas from Liberty Pizza. Evidently my phone, which was securely in my pocket, had somehow activated the Slice app to order the pizzas while I was walking. I was billed for them, but the charge was eventually removed from my credit card account after I complained about it.

On August 4 there was a tornado watch. A branch fell and damaged our gutter. A very large branch fell from a tree near the house on 10 Park St. It landed on and crushed a pickup truck that had been parked nearby. A week or more was required to clean it up. I don’t know what became of the truck.

Translation: In desperate need of a project to occupy my mind during the day, I decided in June to translate one of my travel journals into Italian. My Italian teacher, Mary Trichilo (TREE key low) agreed to read my efforts and to provide suggestions. I chose our 2005 Rick Steves trip to Italy that was billed as the Village Italy Tour.⁵ It was the first one on which the Corcorans joined us, and the first one for my first digital camera.

Reliving that experience was great fun; some of the best moments in my life occurred during those sixteen days. It was also a pretty good way to build my Italian vocabulary back up. I could only hope that I would be able to use it one day. I discovered a few websites that helped me a lot—translate.google.com, of course, but also Reverso.net and LanguageTool.org.

Masks: In the last three quarters of 2020 masks were required virtually everywhere. During the summer it was discovered that the disease was spread by aerosols from exhaling, talking, and singing. Moreover, being indoors greatly increased the probability of transmission. So, it was generally considered acceptable to go outside unmasked, but people were warned to stay at least six feet away from strangers. The last practice was called “social distancing”.

My favorite mask, but the straps tended to break.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) had a problem. Although they knew that the N95 masks that had been approved for use by NIOSH for painters and others who were often exposed to aerosols were by far the most effective, their official announcements said that people did not need them. Instead they recommended that any type of face covering would work just as well. So, a lot of people made their own masks or even wore bandannas across the lower half of their faces like outlaws in westerns. Others, such as I, purchased ten cheap cotton masks made by Hanes that could easily be washed.

There was a good reason for this deliberate misinformation campaign. A shortage of N95 masks was feared, and it was considered critically important that the best protection (and tightly fitting N95 masks offered much better protection) be available to those who dealt with known COVID patients or with large numbers of people in situations that precluded “social distancing”.

For some people masks, especially the ones that worked the best, were very uncomfortable. They did not bother me much at all. I was, however, quite happy when, during the summer, it became apparent that masks were not necessary outdoors. Still, when I took walks I made certain to keep at least six feet away from other walkers whenever possible.

Health: I was never healthier than in 2020. I experienced no significant ailments at all—not even a cold or indigestion. That pain in my foot bothered me a bit, and on one occasion the nail on my left little finger got bent back and eventually fell off. On the other hand, I was exercising so much that I had to make a shopping trip to Kohl’s to buy a smaller belt to hold up my pants.

My mental state was pretty positive as well. I was able to concoct several interesting projects to occupy my mind when I was not exercising or reading. I would have appreciated a diversion now and then, but most of my life had been good preparation for an extended lockdown. I had a lot of experience at keeping myself occupied.

Sue was also pretty healthy physically, but she got winded very easily. Moreover, she has always been a much more social animal than I was. The strain of the isolation on her spirit was quite evident.

We took a couple of short trips just to get out of the house. At some point in June or July we drove down to Gillette Castle and had a little picnic. We found a spot that was shady and isolated. The walk from the parking lot to our site was uphill, and it definitely wore Sue out. After lunch I took a hike up to the castle by myself. Only a few people were there, and I kept my distance from all of them. This was a very simple outing, but it felt like a small taste of freedom. Perhaps prisoners have the same feeling the first time that they are allowed into the exercise yard.

On September 24, when it finally appeared that the Pandemic had abated a bit, we made a road trip to Roger Williams Zoo in Providence. The highlight for me was when we went to see the sloths. I got to show the attendant there that I was wearing a tee shirt with a sloth on it. Sue had bought it for me in Costa Rica.⁸

On the way back to Enfield we made a stop in Willimantic so that Sue could show me the Shaboo Stage, an outdoor venue that she had frequented to watch local musical performers, mostly blues bands. Sue was friendly with several of these people, and she was very worried for them. The lockdown had eliminated their primary source of income.

We made a third stop at Oliver’s Dairy Bar where we ordered burgers and listened—in our cars—to Bruce John singing and playing his guitar. A few people got out of their cars and danced. It was all a little weird, but it was something to do. Sue had claimed that the food would be very good, but we were both disappointed in it.

People our age were terrified to be among strangers, and reasonably so. Not everyone survived that first year. I did not hear of anyone who died directly from COVID-19, but all of the following members of the debate community died in 2020:

Max Horton, whom I knew quite well from the Simsbury Bridge Club.
David Waltz, whose wife I knew from Tuesday evenings at the Hartford Bridge Club and at tournaments. The three of us even went out to dinner one evening in Hyannis, MA.
Elaine Jaworowski, who was a regular player at the HBC morning games.
Gladys Feigenbaum, who only played occasionally at the HBC and did not seem to be in great health before the lockdown. I did not know her well.

Victor (blue shirt) with Lew Gamerman, Kate McCallum, and Sheila Gabay after a victory in 2019.

The most shocking news was the murder of Grand Life Master Victor King in his own home in Hartford on July 26. He was a very popular player and, to all appearances, had no enemies. His assailant was also his tenant. I had played against Victor a few times and I had talked with him about a few matters concerning the district’s website. At the time the incident was covered in local and national outlets as well as abroad. I was not able to find any information about the disposition of the case.

On July 23 my occasional bridge partner, boss, and good friend Bob Bertoni was operated on for the second or third time in recent years. He recovered enough to continue working as the District Director for the rest of the year, but I think that everyone knew that the handwriting was on the wall.

Sue’s friend and occasional bridge partner, Ginny Basch, also went into the hospital in July. A few days after she had been released she needed to return and have a heart valve inserted. She seemed to recover well enough after that.

On November 16 we learned that Tyesha Henry, Sue’s long-time protégée, had COVID-19. Sue had been with her in an automobile on November 6, but Sue did not develop any symptoms. She dodged a bullet.

Food:Few restaurants were open, and those that were provided only delivery and pickup orders. Most of the time Sue and I ate at home. I continued going to the grocery store, but I always wore a mask (as did nearly everyone else), and I always used the automated checkouts. I seldom was within ten feet of another human. Sue usually ordered groceries online and drove to the store to pick them up.

The hybrid Yum restaurant in E. Windsor.

We ordered pizza perhaps once a month, and we drove to KFC three times⁷, once in West Springfield and twice in East Windsor. The first drive to East Windsor, which was probably in May, was very strange. There were almost no cars on any of the roads, but there was a long line at the drive-through window at the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant. I did not get my order until twenty-five minutes after my arrival. When I arrived home we discovered that the bags contained both our $20 fill-up and someone else’s Taco Bell order.

On July 18 Sue and I drove over to the beautiful house of Ken and Lori Leopold in Avon, CT. We were originally planning to go to a restaurant for supper, but the negotiations between Lori and Sue for a suitable place with outdoor seating broke down. We enjoyed a very nice supper and then played a few rubbers of bridge. I played with Sue and then Ken. Lori had never played rubber bridge before! That was the only time in the last nine and a half months of 2020 that we dined indoors with other people.

Sue and I celebrated all of the holidays alone together in our house. That was what one did in The (first) Worst Year Ever.

The Neighborhood: The big news was that in the spring the family that lived diagonally across the street from us (“cattywampus” as my Grandmom Cernech would have said) on the southwest corner of North St. and Allen Pl. unceremoniously moved away. This was the family with several trucks and an ATV that the kids rode around on. The father often flew the “Don’t tread on me” flag and other right-wing banners on their flagpole.

The house (a small ranch house with one garage) and yard were both in bad shape when the family abandoned them. Workers spent weeks getting it back in marketable condition. It was auctioned off; no “For Sale” side ever appeared. It was purchased by a woman who has kept it in immaculate conditioned. She even resuscitated the lawn.

The flagpole has never been used since the other family left.

Three doors to the west of them the “patriotic” cause was taken up by a couple. She grew sunflowers accompanied by Bag-a-Bugs and had a statue of an owl that turned its head occasionally. I scoffed at the former and was enthralled by the latter.

He was another kettle of fish. He also had a flagpole. He flew the “Don’t tread on me” flag, but also other flags including a Trump-Pense banner ones about POW/MIAs or respecting the police. Another Trump sign was proudly displayed above the garage. He also had a “concealed carry” sticker on his car’s window. Most bizarrely, he had a fenced-in back yard with red triangular signs on both gates with the word “MINES” on them, as if the back yard contained mines. I took him seriously; he seemed to be retired from both the military and law enforcement, and he was obviously “gung-ho”.

I generally gave these people a wide berth, but my walking took me past their house quite often.

We really only have one next-door neighbor, the residents of 1 Hamilton Court. A couple with children had been living there for quite a few years. He disappeared from the neighborhood at some point before the Pandemic started. A different man moved in and immediately started making over the house and the back yard. I talked to him for a few minutes once. He seemed friendly enough. Anything would be better than his predecessor, who had said he would kill our cats if they ventured onto his property.

This photo was taken from my chair in the office. Giacomo is the one with the long bushy tail.

The Pets: Our two cats, Giacomo and Bob, really enjoyed the lockdown. Sue and I got in the habit of watching television together from 8 p.m. until I could no longer keep my eyes open, which usually occurred between 9:30 and 10. The cats loved the idea that we were both sitting still. Giacomo often sat peacefully on my lap, as he had done for many years. Now, however, the two of them would also sometimes lie together on a blanket that Sue had laid out on the floor. Giacomo seemed to enjoy having a friend. They assumed every position imaginable, including spooning.

Giacomo showing off his thumbs on the bed on November 1.

In October Giacomo surprised me by catching a moth. When he was younger he was a fearsome hunter, but in 2020 that was the only time that he showed much interest in any wildlife.

Sue and I never knew Giacomo’s real birth date, but we celebrated it annually on November 1. 11/1/20 was his seventeenth birthday. When I returned to bed for my first nap of the day I was shocked to find Giacomo had climbed up on the bed. We enjoyed a nap together for the first time in at least a year.

On Christmas Giacomo found a comfortable resting spot. He was left-pawed. Here he is using his business paw to ask for petting.

On August 4^th, the day of a tornado watch, I discovered that at least one of the cats (I suspected Giacomo) had stopped using the ramp in the basement that led to the cat door and had instead designated an area of the newer side of the basement as an open latrine. After I cleaned up the smelly mess I drove to Target and purchased a large litter box and some cheap litter.

The cats quickly adjusted to using the litter box, but they tracked litter all over everywhere. I solved the problem by switching to Clean Paws, which was much more expensive but did not stick the their feet as much.

Friends: Sue had many, but I really only had one friend, Tom Corcoran. He left the Land of Steady Habits shortly after the Pandemic struck and rented an apartment in Burlington, VT, which is where his children lived.

In 2020 we only saw him once in person. On August 1 he was back in his house in Wethersfield to take care of some business, and Sue and I drove to meet him there. Sue brought with her and antique ice box that Tom pledged to fix it up somehow.

We celebrated Tom’s birthday with a Zoom call on October 27. You should be able to calculate his age if you have read these blogs carefully.

Bridge: There was no face-to-face duplicate bridge in 2020 after the middle of March.

Many people played online. The ACBL even set up an arrangement for “virtual clubs” that held online sanctioned games of eighteen boards. I did not participate.

On November 18 District 25’s Executive Committee held a meeting on Zoom. It was depressing. The ACBL was probably going to cancel the NABC in the spring in St. Louis and the one scheduled for Providence, RI, in the July of 2021. Most of the members of the Executive Committee, including me, were also on the committee for the latter event. It was crushing news.

The North American Pairs and Grand National Teams would be contested online. I did not like this news at all, but I asked Ken Leopold, Felix Springer, and Trevor Reeves to play with me, and they all agreed. I told Ken that I would practice as much as I could online. We played online on Christmas Day, but that was the only time in 2020. I hated the experience, but this might be my last chance to play in Flight B of the GNT.

Sports: The National Basketball Association, like all other forms of indoor entertainment, suspended play when the Pandemic hit. In order to salvage part of the 2019-2020 season the league spent $190 to build a “bubble” at Disney World in Orlando, FL. Twenty-two of the league’s thirty teams were invited to the city to play the remaining eight regular season games and the playoffs behind closed doors. Of course, the games were televised.

Yes, they actually played all of the games in Disney World surrounded by pictures of imaginary fans.

This approach worked very well. Everyone involved in the games stayed in the bubble and was tested regularly. No cases at all were reported. The season ended on October 11, with the Los Angeles Lakers crowned as champions. The league generated about $1.5 billion is revenue.

Other sports did not follow the league’s example. The only one that I was interested in was college football. The Big Ten was pressured by Trump into playing the season, sort off. All non-conference games were canceled, and the beginning of play was postponed until October 24. Games were played in empty or nearly empty stadiums.

Michigan was ranked #18 in the preseason and beat #21 Minnesota 49-24 in the opening game. This was followed by three embarrassing losses. In week 5 the Wolverines used a new quarterback, Cade McNamara, to beat Rutgers in three overtimes. In week 6 they lost to Penn State at home. Since all of its remaining games were canceled due to COVID-19 outbreaks, the team ended the season 2-4, the worst record in living memory.

The whole idea of playing during a pandemic was idiotic. The NCAA ended up granting extra eligibility to all of the players.

I guess that sports addicts enjoyed watching the competitions in empty stadiums and arenas. I did not watch any sports at all during the entire year.

Miscellaneous: I filed my income taxes in February. I did not receive my refund until August 1. There were two reasons for this: Most IRS employees were working remotely, and a large number were busy distributing the $1400 stimulus checks that Donald Trump made sure had his name on them. I am not complaining.

The class that I took in Advanced Italian held only nine of its ten classes. The last one was canceled (without a refund) because of COVID-19. I signed up for the fall class, but it was canceled on September 9.

On August 8 we received a check from AIG for the trip insurance for our cruise in March that had been canceled. AIG, the largest company in the trip insurance market, must have taken a real bath in 2020.

I purchased and tried to read a couple of Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri. They were difficult for me. The narrative was in standard Italian, but most of the dialogue was in the Sicilian dialect, which is much different.

On August 11 Bank of America refused the automatic payment of the bill for our homeowners’ insurance policy. I had received a new credit card and had not yet changed the number on Travelers’ website. It was resolved in a few days.

Beginning on November 10 we enjoyed almost a week of really beautiful weather. Sue and I drove up to her property in Monson, MA. She wanted to walk up to the top, but she got less than a hundred yards before she was out of breath and exhausted. We rested a few minutes and then walked back to the car.

Desperate for something to do, on November 11 I began polishing up my novel Ben 9, which I have posted here. I just had to do this. It had been inside of me, and I had to let it out. I doubt that anyone will ever read it. Who is interested in reading about the clergy in the eleventh century?

What else? I feel as if I have left out something important that happened in 2020. What was it? Oh, yeah, the election. You can read about it here.

1. I don’t know why all the letters are capitalized. It is not an acronym. The five letters stand for Coronavirus Disease. “Corona” is the Latin word for crown. The -19 was added to indicate that it began in 2019.

2. The results have been posted correctly on the ACBL website in the old format at https://web2.acbl.org/tournaments/results/2020/03/2003505/2003505_20.HTM. However, the Live for Clubs results for that day (https://my.acbl.org/club-results/details/126150) do not even show us participating.

3. I tweeted that I thought that Magpie Murders was the best mystery that I had ever read. Anthony Horowitz thanked me in the comments and wished well to the HBC.

4. The Best Buy in Enfield was a casualty of the Pandemic. The building was still empty two years later.

5. The journal for the Sicily trip is posted here.

6. The English version of that trip can be read here.

7. The excursion to the sloth sanctuary is described here.

8. There once was a KFC in Enfield on Route 5, but the owner retired, and the store closed. Enfield contains almost every other kind of fast food place, but for years no one sold fried chicken until a Popeye’s opened in August of 2022.

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Mike

Partners at regionals and sectionals. Continue reading →

This entry contains information about the partners with whom I played regularly at tournaments before the Pandemic. Many experiences with those people have already been described elsewhere. Part 2, which is posted here, is about partners with whom I played at tournaments only once or twice.

I enjoyed playing in pairs games at the clubs for the first few years when I was still working a very large number of hours. During this period I read the Bridge Bulletin from cover to cover every month and tried to make sense of the dazzling array of tournaments that were being held around the country. When I started playing at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Dick Benedict (introduced here), he had already put together a group of people who played in tournaments together. He asked me to join that group, and I was eager to do so.

Partners from the SBC: I am not positive, but I think that the first tournament in which I played was with Dick as my partner in a 299er (restricted to players with less than 300 masterpoints) game in the Knockout Regional at a hotel in Cromwell, CT. That would probably have been in February of 2008. I remember that it was held in a separate room across from the main ballroom. During a break Dick escorted me across the hall to see what the players there were doing. I found the vista stupefying. The place was huge, and it was full of bridge tables. At each one were seated four people, most of whom had huge heads. I have never heard anyone discuss this aspect of bridge, but it was the first thing that I noticed. I felt that this was where I belonged.

The game in the 299er room was run by Sue Miguel. She reminded me of a grade school teacher. She was very proud of the fact that the candy that she offered to her charges contained more chocolate than could be obtained elsewhere. The 299er games seemed rinkiy-dink to me. On the one hand, the games seemed less challenging than the ones at either the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or the SBC; on the other I had a hard time understanding what the opponents’ bids meant. After just a few sessions I determined that although I found the concept of tournaments fascinating, I wanted more than the 299er rooms had to offer. In retrospect I must admit that this was probably hubris.

At first Dick’s preferred partner at tournament was Virginia Labbadia. She was, as I recall a retired salesperson for Xerox. I played on a few teams with them. Dick offered to help her make Life Master if she would help him. He was shocked that she turned him down, and so he asked me.

Eventually Dick and I had great success together playing in bracketed team games (knockouts, compact knockouts, and round robins) with Robert Klopp and Brenda Harvey. Many of our adventures have already been described here. Dick already knew Robert and Brenda when we started playing together. He probably had played against them at tournaments.

One of the regulars at the SBC, Sonja Smith², recommended that her son, Steve Smith,³ try playing with me at the games in Simsbury. Shortly thereafter Dick, who was a Life Master by then, decided he did not want to play with me in Simsbury. Steve and I started playing there and on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. We also attended several memorable tournaments together. Most of those exploits, including our trip to Reno, NV, have already been described here.

One thing that I neglected to mention was that Steve seldom carried any cash with him. More than once I had to pay his table fees for him. Of course he paid me back. Cash to him was an old person’s money.

Steve bought a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield, MA. He rented out his spare bedrooms to other guys. When I drove there to pick him up I never knew what I would encounter. In at least one case I had to wait for him to get dressed.

Nearly all of our car trips to tournaments were interesting. I remember that Steve told me once about an idea that he had for a dating app. He was serious about developing it and marketing it. I thought that he was crazy. I never learned whether anything ever came of it.

Steve and I were both fans of Phil Hendrie, a radio host from Los Angeles, who conducted outrageous and offensive interviews of himself using other voices. After a few minutes he would invite people to call in. Many people did, and the results were hilarious. Phil’s regular listeners never called because they knew that it was a stunt.

Steve and I both occasionally listened to Art Bell on his Coast to Coast AM radio show. Steve once played for me a recording of Phil Hendrie interviewing himself as someone accompanying Art Bell on a mission to find aliens that had landed near Las Vegas.

I also played bridge with Steve’s mother Sonja a few times We were partners once at the SBC and once or twice at the HBC. We also played together for two sessions at the sectional in Orange that was held in June of 2022. That event has been documented here.

I went to quite a few tournaments with Sue Rudd. When we started playing together I was a Life Master and she was not. This was in spite of the fact that she had joined the ACBL seventeen years before I did. I have written extensively about my long relationship with Sue. You can read about many of the experiences here.

Sue stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2010. She was the only person whom I ever heard complain vociferously about the cost of playing bridge. Then again, she also complained about the cost of gasoline and just about everything else. I suppose that it was difficult for her to manage her expenses on the fixed income that she received as a former employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On the other hand, one of her sons paid for quite a few foreign vacations for her, and she often mentioned how many famous ski resorts on different continents that she had visited over her lifetime.

Sue still played bridge occasionally at the end of 2023, but I don’t know of any sanctioned games in which she was participating other than occasional appearances at the SBC.

My occasional partnerships with Jerry Hirsch were documented pretty thoroughly here. As of November 2023 he still played with Sally Kirtley nearly every Tuesday morning at the HBC and Wednesday evening at the SBC. His smiling face has not been seen at a tournament for some time before Covid-19 arrived.

My last (as of November 2023) regular partner at the SBC was Ken Leopold. I have recounted some of our many adventures together here. Ken was still working as a physician as of late 2023. Since the Pandemic I have not played with him in any tournaments, although he asked me to play in the 2023 Gala Regional in Marlborough. I had to decline because of a previous commitment to another player. Most of the time he has played with his wife, Lori.

In the fall of 2023 Ken started directing the Saturday afternoon pairs game at the HBC. It was sort of an experiment.

Partners from the HBC: The stories about my partners from the HBC that are recounted here include many recollections about tournament play, as well.

I played with Tom Gerchman at quite a few tournaments, including the NABC in Boston in 2008, at which time I had less than fifty masterpoints. That experience and many others have been documented here.

After I had stopped playing with Gerch I was subjected to one more instance in which I had to sit across from him. Both of us were playing in the Individual Regional Tournament in Newton, MA, in January. In individual events players have different partners for each round. So, in a session of twenty-seven boards they would play with nine different partners. By chance one of my seven was Gerch.

On the first hand he opened 3♦, a preemptive bid that indicated a below average hand with seven diamonds. The player on my right passed. I also passed, which told Tom that I had fewer than three diamonds, and I did not think that we could take ten tricks. The player on my left bid 3♥.

Tom’s first bid had limited his hand. That made me the captain. Nevertheless, he channeled his inner Mister Christian and he bid 4♦. The ONLY excuse for doing this would be if he discovered that he had actually had eight diamonds. He didn’t.

After two passes the player on my left reluctantly bid 4♥. This raised the stakes a lot. Now our opponents might potentially get 620 points for a game contract as opposed to 140 or 170 for the three-level bid. Tom did not hesitate. He took the 5♦ card from his bidding box and set it on the table. The next player immediately doubled, of course.

I really felt like calling the director and asking him/her if I could join the opponents in the double. I had played nothing but pass cards. Now I was going to be the dummy. Why must I be punished for my partner’s reckless and totally unilateral bidding?

Now that I have had time to think about it, I should have redoubled. We were going to get a zero anyway. Why not make Gerch sweat a little more.

In fact, Tom and I ended up getting zeroes on all three hands. This was an astounding result. Of all the pairs playing these three hands—probably at least ten—we did worse than all of them all three times. I am happy to say that that was the last time that I ever had to play across from Gerch.

My first team event was at a regional tournament at the Hilton Hotel in Danbury, CT,⁴ in the autumn of 2008. Dick and I played together. Our teammates were Virginia and Inge Schuele (ING uh SHOO luh), one of Dick’s regular partners at the club. Our team had a total of less than 600 masterpoints. Our opponents had at least ten times that amount. We got pasted.⁵

The match lasted all morning. Afterwards the four of us ate lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and discussed what to do in the afternoon. There was a 199er pairs game in the afternoon. Both Inge and I had less than 200 points, and so we could play in it. The fact that we had not played together was not of great import. We used the card that Inge played with Dick, and I adjusted. I seem to remember that Dick and Virginia played in the pairs games for seniors, which at that time was anyone over 60.

After lunch I insisted on finding a quiet place at the hotel so that I could take a short nap. In my working days I always did this.

Our opposition in the 199er event was several steps below the level of our opponents in the knockout. They made many mistakes. When all was said and done Inge and I had a score well over 60 percent, and we were first overall. We were presented with small trophies, and out photos were taken. Our pictures appeared in the next day’s Bulletin for the tournament. This was the only trophy that I ever won in bridge, and it was the only time that my photo appeared in print until the time that my image appeared on the cover of a bridge book written by a Canadian.⁶

Although I don’t think that I ever paired up with Inge at the HBC, I am positive that we played together at several tournaments. I learned that Inge spoke Italian and in days gone by had conducted tours of parts of Italy. Her husband, Werner (VAIR nair), was a retired airline pilot who flew for Lufthansa.

I vividly remember one hand that Inge and I played together in Sturbridge, MA. It might have been at the qualifier of the North American Pairs that was held there every year. Inge had opened 1♣. I had four clubs, but my primary responsibility was to bid a four-card major (hearts or spades). She rebid her clubs, and the opponents then entered the auction. I used the principles of Losing Trick Count⁷ (LTC) to determine that we could probably make 5♣, and that was what I bid. Sure enough, she was able to win the requisite eleven tricks, and there was no chance for a twelfth.

LTC does not always work, but it is a good tool for estimating the total number of tricks you probably can take in a suit contract. Inge had never heard of this technique, but she later told me that Werner, who also played bridge, had heard of it and used it.

Inge has not played in a tournament since 2018, and she stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2022, at which time she had reached the rank of Bronze Life Master. I have not seen her at the HBC since the reopening in 2021, but she might still play elsewhere.

I must close this section with a startling fact. My wife Sue told me more than once that she had been jealous of Inge and had worried that I would run off to Italy with her.

Shortly after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman I asked Michael Dworetsky to be my partner on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. After that he sometimes worked me in when his regular partner was not available. However, we did play quite a bit in tournaments. The most memorable of those occasions have been documented here.

I recently discovered that Michael won the Barb Shaw trophy in 2011. It was annually awarded to the Flight C player who earned the most masterpoints at a designated sectional in Connecticut. The CTBridge.org website misspelled his last name, capitalizing the W and leaving off the D. I told the webmaster about the mistake a month ago, but a month or so has now passed, and it had not been rectified.

The tournament took place from March 4 through March 11 in 2011. I played with Michael all three days. We had a terrific tournament. On Friday afternoon we finished second in C in the open pairs. On Saturday morning we finished second in C in the B/C pairs. In the afternoon we won the B/C pairs, outscoring the other twenty-five teams. In the B/C Sunday Swiss we teamed up with Tom Gerchman and Linda Starr and finished first in a field of eighteen teams. All told, we won 11.49 points, which was more than all but eleven players at the tournament. All of them had a lot more experience and masterpoints than I did. I was not eligible for the trophy because I was already a Life Master, and so Michael got to keep it for a year.

The most dramatic moment that I ever experienced in bridge was when I was playing in a Swiss event with Michael as my partner. Our opponents were Jade Barrett, a professional from South Dakota, and a female client. Our teammates were Bob and Shirley Derrah, who in that match were playing against two experts from Connecticut.

The match was fairly tight until the last hand, which had remarkable distribution. Michael and I had a lot of hearts. Our opponents had spades. We bid to 4♥. The client bid 4♠.. Eventually Michael bid 6♥., and she bid 6♠.. Michael passed. I had a void in a side suit that I had not mentioned and the ♠A. I was pretty sure that, if all of the suits were distributed as seemed apparent from the bidding, that our side could take thirteen tricks as long as hearts were trumps. So, I bid 7♥., and she doubled.

Michael had to play it very carefully, but every suit was as I expected. He managed to get all thirteen tricks. At the other table our counterparts stopped at 6♥., and the Derrahs did not double. The swing was large enough for us to claim a victory in the match. It was a huge upset. What made this very special was the fact that it was not a fluke. I used what I knew from the bidding and rightly determined that we could take all the tricks.

While researching the 2016 NABC I discovered that Michael and I had played together in that tournament in two bracketed Round Robins. In the first one we teamed up with a couple from New Jersey and won our bracket. In the second one we played with the Derrahs and finished third.

Michael and his wife Ellen moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL. Michael still seems to play a lot of bridge. He even made it back to New England for the Granite State Regional in Nashua in 2023. I also saw him at an event in Auburn, MA, shortly before the Pandemic.

Dave Landsberg was not my best partner, but he was my favorite. I liked him a lot, and I admired him. Our adventures together have been chronicled here. Included there are the few times that I played with Pat Fliakos. I met both of them in the Tuesday evening games at the HBC.

On the last day of the Fall NABC in Providence in 2014 I played with Dave in bracket #7 of the RIBA Bracketed B teams event. The previous day the team that we were both on had narrowly won a similar event that is described here. On that occasion we were just teammates. On the last day we played as partners; our teammates were Felix Springer and Ken Leopold. This event was not nearly as close. What I remember most about it was that Felix and Ken filed two protests of director’s decisions, and both were rejected. That score of 114 is astoundingly high, much higher than the scores of winners of any of the other brackets.

I played with Felix Springer at many tournaments. Most often he was a teammate, but we also were partners quite a few times, especially at NABC events. Felix had played at high-level events when he was at Columbia, and he developed the same taste for national competition that I had. Our most successful pairing was for the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington that is described in the Paul Burnham section.

In the autumn of 2019 we played in the NABC in San Francisco. For some reason I did not keep notes for this tournament. So, I must rely on my memory.

Our primary objective was to do well in the Super Seniors pairs and the Mini-Blue Ribbon pairs. We came very close to making it to the second day in each, but we fell just short of both of those goals. However, we did finish fifth in the Saturday BC pairs and the Thursday BC pairs. We also teamed up with Bob Sagor and Judy Hyde to finish a very close second in bracket #1 of the Wednesday bracketed teams. All told, we won 26.23 gold points together.

When I arrived at the airport it was late in the evening, and I was very sleepy. I was tricked into using a credit card skimmer that was attached to the machine that sold BART tickets. I had to cancel the card, but I did not lose any money.

The tournament was the last NABC in which NABC events like the two that we played in were scheduled for afternoon and evening as opposed to morning and afternoon. I had great difficulty maintaining my concentration in the evening sessions. I consumed a lot of coffee. There were no concessions in the basement in the evenings. When I needed a coffee I had to race up the escalators to the first floor.

I remember several ancillary details about the tournament. The games were in the basement of one of the two Marriott hotels. One morning while I was taking the escalator down to the playing area my Goodwill Committee pin fell off and landed pin-side down between two metal bars on the step in front of me. I had a coffee cup in one hand and papers in the other. I tried to reach down to save it, but I was unable to grasp it before it disappeared into the bottom of the escalator. Felix and I walked both stayed in the Marriott across from Union Square. At the time I was still bothered by foot pain after a half mile or so.

Felix gave me a bottle of wine that he had won by winning a section in an evening side game. I saved the bottle as a souvenir. He also let me share his Uber ride back to the airport. Our driver was from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Tournament partners from outside of the Hartford area: I played a lot more tournament bridge than most of of my partners at the HBC and SBC. Listed in this section are the people with whom I had more than a passing relationship. That is, I played with them for more than one or two sessions, and we spent some time making sure that we agreed on our methods.

I met Ginny Iannini in 2013. At the time she was playing with her wheelchair-bound husband, Bill King, in some of the same events in which I participated. They won the Gold Rush Swiss in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell, CT, in February of 2014. This was the first tournament at which I launched my program of taking photos of the winners of events and posting them on the NEBridge.org website. I dutifully took the photo⁸ of their team with my point-and-shoot Canon camera.

Only one other winning team came to see me for a photo in that entire tournament. It made me realize that I would need to hunt down the winning pairs and teams and beg them to let me snap a photo of them. That meant that this project would entail much more work than anticipated, but I was committed to do it, and I committed to doing it for eight years.

I enjoyed working and playing with Ginny. After her husband’s death she became pretty devoted to bridge. She lived in Brewster, MA, which is on Cape Cod. She took bridge lessons there from a very fine player, Steve Rzewski.^.9 I learned the Blooman convention from her, as well as Spiral (which we called Q&Q, short for quantity and quality).

At one point Ginny asked me in an email if I was married. I pointed her to an abbreviated form of the journal that I had kept of one of our Larry Cohen cruises, entitled “Honeymoon for One.” The whole journal is posted here. She occasionally talked about her problems with her first husband, a doctor as I remember. She made it clear that she took him to the cleaners when they got divorced. She also told me about a dentist whom she had been dating while we were playing together.

In those early years Ginny was pretty active in the administration of bridge in New England. She was elected to the Board of Directors for the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA), she was a member of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, and she was the tournament chairman of the Senior Regional on Cape Cod at least once. The very first email that I sent out in support of a regional tournament was that one.

Ginny and I did pretty well together. We won numerous events, including one at the NABC in Providence in 2014. My original write-up of the most exciting and nerve-wracking event of my bridge career was lost in the catastrophic computer crash of 2015. I will need to try to recreate it from memory. We were playing in bracket #6 of the Mary Carter Bracket B Swiss on Saturday, December 6, 2014. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg and Pat Fliakos. We were doing well throughout the event, but a team of players from the Montreal area was only a little behind us when we played against them in the last round.

Ginny and I were playing against two ladies. Dave and Pat faced two men. The match seemed to come down to one critical hand. Ginny opened the bidding and then reversed, showing a strong hand with at least seventeen high-card points. She had that, but barely, and some of her holdings were a little shaky. She had no aces. We ended up a slam that I had to play, and I was unable to find a way to make it. When the last hand had been played, we were crestfallen as we walked to the other table to compare scores with Dave and Pat.

It was as we feared. Our counterparts had stopped in game and easily made their contract. That swing offset some small positives that we amassed on other hands. We clearly lost the match. However, because of the lead we had coming into the match, we still would be ahead by two victory points. The captain of the Quebecois team brought the tabulation card to our table for confirmation, but he claimed a significantly larger margin of victory than we had calculated. I walked with him back to their table and discovered that the ladies had made a mistake, and we did indeed win by two victory points. To put that in perspective, the two teams that tied for third were 29 points behind the Canadians. Furthermore, their score would have won any other bracket.

I always enjoyed playing with Ginny. I think that I might have been too intense or too ambitious for her. She never officially dumped me, but she stopped accepting my invitations, and eventually I got the message. Another factor was that after she remarried, she played a lot less bridge. She still seemed to be playing somewhere in 2023, but she has not attended any tournaments since 2019.

I did receive an email from her when I solicited nominations for the Weiss-Bertoni award (described here). She was the first person to nominate Joe Brouillard, the eventual winner.

We enjoyed several suppers together during tournaments. I remember a few distinctly. The first was at Siena, a very nice restaurant in East Greenwich, RI. Bob Bertoni, who was the D25 president at the time, was in attendance, as well as several people from the Boston area. Two of them were quite drunk. Ginny found it curious, but I found it unpleasant.

We also ate at a restaurant called Il Forno in Providence with people from the Cape whom Ginny knew and had arranged to be our teammates. The woman was named Ginny O’Toole. I have forgotten the guy’s name. That was another rather strange occasion.

We ate at least twice at Cafe Fiore, a restaurant in Cromwell, CT, near the hotel that hosted the regional tournament there for many years. On the last of those occasions I disclosed my idea for a novel about Pope Benedict IX (posted here). She had a strange and disturbing reaction: “You want to be the pope!”

I once made the mistake of admitting that when I first met Ginny I had considered her likely to be “high maintenance.” However, after I got to know her I judged that my initial judgment had been wrong. I considered this admission as a compliment to her, but I think that she was at least slightly offended.

Ginny was very active in fundraising for the preservation and/or restoration of a historical piece of property on Cape Cod. I think that it was a captain’s residence or something like that. I never learned what happened to that project.

Ginny was tall and thin. Opponents often thought that we were married. Her fingers were preternaturally long. Her span was almost a match for mine, and the span of my left hand is eleven inches.

I was astounded to learn that Ginny was ten months older than I was. She certainly did not look it. She kept in shape by doing yoga. The last thing that I remembered her saying to me was that from that point on she would always wear yoga pants to tournaments. I haven’t seen her in several years, and I definitely miss her.

Paul Burnham was a lawyer who lived and worked in the town of Wilton, CT, a long way from Hartford. Nevertheless, he has recently been a member in good standing of the HBC. He hardly ever makes the drive to play in anything except special games. I know that our first time as teammates was in the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2016. I somehow set Paul up to play with Charlie Curley from the Boston area while I played with Felix Springer. We made it to the semifinals of this event. The last match was the first and only time that I played with screens. It made me quite nervous because my handwriting had already deteriorated somewhat, and my notes to my screenmate were difficult to read.

At some point Paul and I committed to play as partners in a tournament. In preparation I drove to a town in southeastern Connecticut where there was a club game that Paul frequented. The competition was tough, and we were not used to each other’s styles. We did not win any points.

I also played in an open pairs game with Paul either at that tournament or at a subsequent NABC tournament in Toronto. I used the Flannery convention, but Paul was unaware that it was on our card.

I also played with Paul for three days at the summer NABC in Providence in 2022. For some reason we were not able to click on that occasion either. The story of that experience begins here.

I am not sure why Paul and I have had so little success as a partnership. It would seem to me that are styles are compatible. I like to play with him, and I hope to get another chance to do so.

I don’t remember how I met Jeanne Martin, who lived in the Worcester area. Her husband was an expert player who died several years before I met her.

Perhaps we were set up by the partnership desk at some tournament in the late teens. We played together at several tournaments. I remember that we were in a team event in Mansfield, MA, and she finally appeared about ten minutes after the first round was scheduled to start. She said that her car’s GPS gave her instructions that sent her in circles. In the age of Google Maps it astounded me that she used a built-in GPS in her car rather than the one that comes free with every cellphone and is supported and maintained by Google.

We did not win any events together, but we both seemed to enjoy playing together. I drove up to Auburn, MA, which was the site of the sectionals and unit-wide games for the Central Massachusetts Bridge Association (CMBA). Our results seemed to get worse over time.

Jeanne once appeared in a cameo role in a feature-length move. She was in an ice cream parlor. She sent me a file that contained a video of the scene.

Before the Pandemic Jeanne was on the board of directors for unit 113 (CMBA). She told me that she did not get along with some of the other board members and wanted to resign.

Jeanne attended the 2022 Gala Regional in Marlborough, MA, but she did not win any points. She still seemed to be playing bridge online or somewhere in 2023.

The team of Trevor Reeves, Bob Weld, me, and Bob Sagor, won Bracket 2 of the Thursday-Friday knockout in Nashua in 2019.

I played with Bob Sagor at tournaments in Nashua, NH. He lived in Greenfield, MA, which is on I-91 near the Vermont state. His principal partner was Judy Hyde. They often played together at events sponsored by the Northampton Bridge Club and at tournaments. He sometimes played with me when Judy was not available.

I do not have many specific memories of the bridge games that I played with Bob. Since I had also played with Judy, it was rather easy for us to agree on a card. I vividly remember that on one occasion I was complaining something stupid that one of my partners (maybe my wife Sue) had done. Bob asked me wryly, “Am I better of worse than them?” I said that I needed more time to think about it.

Like nearly all bridge players Bob had an interesting backstory. He was a couple of years older than I was, which meant that the draft was a big factor when he finished college. He and his wife Claire moved to Nova Scotia to avoid it, and they only returned when its avoidance was no longer considered a crime. In real life he was a veterinarian.

During the Pandemic Bob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When the bridge world reopened in 2021 he was unable to participate in live events. However, he still was very active in online play, especially with the Noho Club. An article about Bob’s involvement with bridge in western Massachusetts that was printed in the Greenfield Recorder in June of 2023 has been posted here.

I was assigned by the partnership desk to play with Sohail Hasan in the open pairs game on Thursday, November 7, 2019, at the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA. We hit it off pretty well. We finished eleventh overall out of fifty pairs and fifth in the B strat. The conventions that we played were quite similar. His approach to 2NT responses was much more sophisticated than what I was accustomed to. Unfortunately, we later came to understand that we had substantial disagreements about what some of the entries on our convention card meant.

I learned that Sohail had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and had been employed at a Wall Street firm (LinkedIn page here). He had a house on Cape Cod and another in New York or New Jersey. Most of his acquaintances in the bridge world seemed to come from NYC or New Jersey.

During the Pandemic Sohail asked me if I wanted to play in the NABC in the summer of 2022 in Providence, RI. I agreed to play with him in two team games in which we did pretty well. Unfortunately, our teammates in that last event contracted Covid-19 and had to drive home early. So, on the last day we played in the fast pairs, and I had a miserable time. The details of these adventures have been recounted here.

The Ocean State Regional has been held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for many years.

Over the rest of the summer Sohail and I maintained email communications. We committed to play together in the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. I have explored here the miserable time that I had at what had always been my favorite tournament. I encountered several problems with Sohail. He has a fiery temper, and he unleashed it several times at me and once in even greater fury at a pro that he knew from the New York area. He insisted that the XYZ convention did not apply when the participants bid 1x-1y-1NT. I found this preposterous. He pointed me to an article by Larry Cohen that advocated playing New Minor Forcing in that situation. I replied that LC was an outlier in this regard. Furthermore, the name of the convention was derived from the fact that it could be used in any sequence of three calls that ended with a bid at the one level: most commonly 1x-1y-1z.

The biggest problems began with the fact that he played BOSTON (Bottom Of Something ; Top of Nothing) leads, but he refused to mark them on his convention card, and if anyone asked what he played, he always answered “Standard”, which was not true. He also showed up at the very last minute (or later) for every. This bothered me a lot because I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page about everything, and we played some conventions that were new to me. Finally, he had a peculiar overhand style to playing his cards, which resulted in him sometimes slamming them on the table. When others objected to this technique, he sometimes responded with unnecessary aggression.

In short, I decided after the Warwick debacle not to play with Sohail again. He has attended two NABC events since then, but no D25 tournaments.

The adventures at tournaments that involved partners with whom I played only once or twice are posted here. The new partners with whom I have played since the renaissance of bridge after the Pandemic are described here.

1. Virginia Labbadia is not in my database of ACBL members, which means that she stopped paying dues before I started downloading rosters in 2014. She definitely played at the HBC rather regularly before the Pandemic. I have no way of discovering if she ever made Life Master.

2. Sonja Smith and her husband Chris moved to Chapel Hill, NC, in 2022.

3. Steve was still a member of the ACBL in late 2023, but he only had 122 masterpoints, most of which he won with me more than ten years earlier.

4. Although Danbury is definitely part of New England and therefore in District 25, the tournament there was sponsored by District 3 (northern New Jersey and eastern New York). D25 had reportedly tried to use the site for a regional at least once, but the attendance was not good. Before the Pandemic D3 paid D25 a small sum for the right to use the site. I think that the hotel is now called Zero Degrees. D3 has not used it since the reopening.

5. What I most remember from this match was the fact that the opposition used the 2♦ bid to show a hand with 11-15 masterpoints, a singleton or void, and at least four cards in the other three suits. This hand is difficult to bid with standard methods. I remember spending hours going over hand records that I had collected and projected how I would bid hands with that distribution with or without the Mini-Roman convention. I intended to collect enough evidence to convince Dick to use it. However, my research did not disclose that it had much, if any, value. One of the best defenses is just to pass. The players who used Mini-Roman often ended up one level two high.

6. The book is called Winning at Matchpoints, and the author is named Bill Treble. I use the photo (which was taken at the NABC in Honolulu in 2017) to demonstrate my game face at the bridge table.

7. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.

8. The photo that I took, which had an embarrassing smudge on it, has apparently been lost forever. I think that the original was on an external hard drive for which I have no power cord. The photo that was posted was lost in the catastrophic computer event on NEBridge.org in 2015.

9. Steve Rzewski won the Larry Weiss award in 2010. I also dealt with Steve when I asked the experts in the district if they could supply articles for the NEBridge.org. He was a regular contributor.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Reeves, Trevor

2022 July: The Providence NABC: 7/15-19

2021 Part 2: The Pandemic Strikes Back

2020 Part 1: Pandemic Wars

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady