If You Think I'm Older And Missing My Younger Days

By Wm. on April 15, 2025

Forty years ago this evening, I played my first game of duplicate bridge.

Mark H and I had been teaching ourselves since the previous summer, dealing out hands and trying to bid and play on our own. That arrangement wasn't particularly satisfactory, and we were able to rope in some friends to join us, all of us rank beginners. At some point in the spring of '85 it occurred to Mark and me there might be a club in Lexington; one presumes we cracked open a telephone book and made a call. The Monday evening game was set aside for novices, and so on April 15, two college juniors headed for the outskirts of the city. The Lexington Bridge Center was tucked in at the end of a hallway behind some of the storefronts of the Park Hills Shopping Center.

We were easily the youngest people there. Jerry, the director of the novice game, may well have been the only other male in the room. He got us settled in at table 4, sitting East-West (which meant we moved from table to table between rounds--North-South stayed put). Our first opponents were Della and Geneva, who were in their 50s. Altogether there were seven tables of players, though Jerry played to fill the movement. Because he had too many masterpoints to be eligible for awards in this game, he and his partner's first-place finish as East-West didn't count, which meant that Mark's and my 52.7% game was good enough for second and 0.13 masterpoints.

Jerry gave us a copy of the East-West score sheet as well.

We were hooked. Over the next year Mark and I regularly showed up on Mondays (this was the summer we roomed together at Transy while working at IBM) and slowly got to know some of the characters in the Lexington bridge scene, even occasionally partnering with more experienced players. Geneva invited us to her house a couple of times for a pickup game with her and Della. We were "the boys," and even if some folks were more than a little gruff at times, overall we were certainly made to feel welcome.

I wrote several years ago about how it took almost three years after starting grad school to get back to bridge. When I did, I wound up making numerous lifelong friends: Mark L, Greg, Katie, Toby, Karl, Jay, Michelle, Chris, Josh, and Karen, among plentry of others (in fact, I seem to recall that Mark L told me once he also played his first duplicate game on or around 4/15/85, while a freshman in college in Indiana). I also got better at bridge over time. I became a Life Master (when then required 300 masterpoints) right around the time I started my job at Georgetown. I've continued to play at varying levels of intensity over the years and am now knocking on the door of 1250 points. As enjoyable as it is to do well, it's the people I've met along the way that are most important. The game, more or less in the words of Chico Escuela, has been very, very good to me.

Tonight there's a game at the Lexington club. I'd thought about asking Sheila, one of the folks who was there at my first game forty years ago, if she'd be interested in playing. Somehow I never got around to contacting her--it's probably just as well, as I came down with a cold late last week. When I do get to the club these days, I'm still among the younger people in the room--one wonders what the state of bridge will be in a decade. Many of the folks I've met at the table across the decades are of course gone--Jerry passed away in 2013, Geneva in 2016, and Della just this past January.

The title is a line from Billy Joel's "Keeping the Faith," which was in its last week on the Top 40 on 4/13/85. It's the only single from An Innocent Man I own (never bought the album, either). Joel is saying you're wrong if you think he was losing himself in his past by recording An Innocent Man--he was simply acknowledging a debt he owed to those days while also encouraging us to keep looking forward (but bear in mind that he wasn't even 35 when he wrote "Keeping the Faith"). It's no surprise that it's the final song on the album.

I'm not so sure my intentions in landing on that line today are the same as Joel's; I think I'd love to spend a day or three back at college or grad school right now, slinging cards across the table instead of being lost in let's remember.