“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” T. Roosevelt

“Hello Silence, my old friend…..”

It’s four in the morning ’n I’m sitting in front of the durn computer again…tired of Solitaire…..My mother taught me to play Solitaire, don’t remember my age at the time, but I’m pretty sure that she was afflicted with the same whatever that causes my eyes to pop wide open in the middle of the night…

I c’n see her now, well, in my mind’s eye anyway…the mind’s eye is an old country term for imagination 'n seems to fit better at this time of night...

She’s been gone for fifteen years now ’n the picture in my mind is from sixty years ago…Mom sitting at the kitchen table in that little house in Beattyville, wearing a dark red robe, smoking ’n playing Solitare…

Seems we always had a deck of cards in the house back then…I learned to play Solitare ’n Gin Rummy…prob’ly some other games too but I’ve forgotten those…

William D. Wells ’n m’self got stuck at Yamada Air Station outside Tokyo for a month or six weeks back in ’56…we each got a $20 dollar partial payment, an advance on wages owed, that lasted about fifteen minutes or so as our expectations were that we’d be there only a few days…that’s when we truly learned that the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly…we whiled away the time playing 500 Rummy ’n concocting signals so that we could ‘win’ money from those who passed thru more quickly….we justified our actions by explaining to each other that coke ’n cigarettes were a necessity for those caught in limbo…

When I wuz a student at Morehead, we played a somewhat endless game of Hearts…I no longer recall how to play that game at all…we also played a little poker, especially on Sunday evenings…I wuz, ’n remained, a very cautious poker player, having learned early in life the futility of drawing to an inside straight…even so, I managed to supplement my meager income of the time (coffee ’n cigarettes being, at the time, a life necessity for a college student)…

There have been other card games in my life…in northern Ohio, I learned to play Euchre (gone from my mem’ry banks now)…North Highlands, I played Backgammon with Big Bob Baxter (somewhere in the attic is, I suspect, a Backgammon board)…

There were other card games that have come ’n gone over the years ’n I doubt if there is a real deck of cards in the house although, to be frank, I’m not sure what is hidden upstairs…no matter, the computer hides many things, among which are multiple games of Solitaire…’n on cards that a click of the mouse will change the back of the card…at the present time, there is a picture of Millyrose…..

Whatever, I have my mother’s insomnia…I don’t which side of the family she got it from ’n I don’t know if any of my children have it…if they do, I wish them well however they may cope with it…I gave up fighting it years ago ’n just try to get along now…of course, being in my dotage helps with that as society tends to see a daily nap as an acceptable thing for an old greybeard…..

“I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything ’til noon. That’s when it’s time for my nap.”  Bob Hope