Category: Snowbird

Squelched

Hearts is my favorite card game but I play Rook every once in a while, usually at a family reunion or, in this case, at Snowbird.  And, truth be told, when my niece, Pam Stith, is my partner we usually win.

I don’t like playing with the 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s, but my son, Mark, and his friend, Conan Shearer, wanted to play with all the cards so Pam and I said OK, make yourselves happy.  Those cards don’t matter a whole lot anyway; when you play Rook nothing much matters but the Rook itself. 

Pam is a really good player and if we got the Rook as many times as they did, anywhere close to as many times, we’d win, regardless of how many cards we played with. Of that I was pretty certain.

Conan, L, and Mark Stith: they were dealt the Rook 7 out of 8 hands.
Conan Shearer, L, and Mark Stith: Rook magnets.

But we didn’t get the Rook at all. They got it all three hands and won the game with over 500 points to our whatever.

So, I said, OK, let’s take out the 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s and play again. And we did.

This time they got the Rook four of the five hands it took them to reach 500, and won again.

That’s when Conan said to me, as politely as can be, “Would you like to take out some more cards?”

Postscript: Shearer graduated from UNC and then earned an MBA and Master of Science in Information Management from Arizona  State University. He is now an executive at Exxon.  Whether he still gets the Rook seven out of eight hands is unknown.

Coming Monday:  Something Like?

The view from the top of Mark's tower.
The view from the top of Mark’s tower last week.

NOTE: Went to Snowbird again last week [Nov. 1-5], 11 of us, friends and family. Pitched some shoes, played some Hearts –but no Rook– and ate like royalty.

The Truck Technician

When I tried to start my old Chevy S-10 all I heard was a clicking sound, like the battery was nearly dead. But how could that be?

Don Allemann, a friends for the last 50 years.
Don Allemann, my friend for the last 50 years, at Snowbird.

Don Allemann and I had just stopped for breakfast at a fast food restaurant off of I-40 west of Winston-Salem somewhere. The truck had been running just fine until I cut it off and Don and I went inside to get sausage biscuits and coffee.  But not now.

I had no idea where I was going to find a mechanic. I didn’t even know the name of the town. Don’t know it now. I walked across the street to a convenience store to see if maybe someone there could point me in the right direction.

The only customer in the store had just paid for his cigarettes so I asked the guy at the cash register if he knew where I could find a mechanic.

The customer, still standing the the register, said to the clerk, “He’s looking for a technician.”

I wasn’t talking to him and his comment irritated me just a little.

The clerk looked like a foreigner and I wondered if had understood me. I repeated myself: “My truck won’t start and I need a mechanic.” The customer, who was looking at me now, repeated himself:  “He needs a technician.”  

This guy needed to mind his own business.

And then it dawned on me what he meant by that, and I asked, “Are you a mechanic?” He said he was, and I pointed through the convenience store window at my truck and asked him if he had time to take a look at it.  He did.

We walked out of the convenience store together but instead of turning left toward my truck, he turned the other way and walked a few feet to his shop. I had broken down across the street from a garage that fixed cars and trucks. He picked up a rubber mallet and said to two feet sticking out from under a car, “I’ll be right back.”

The technician's tool.
The technician’s tool.

As we walked across the street to my truck the “technician” told me, “I know what’s wrong with it.”

“What?” I asked.

“You got a bad fuel pump.”

He told me to get in and crank it when he gave me the go-ahead. Then he dropped to the ground, reach under my truck and started banging on the gas tank with his mallet.  My truck started right up.

Postscript: The “technician” said my truck might keep on starting for a week, a month, maybe several months. Or it might not start the next time. If that happened, get somebody to bang on the gas tank, he said.  I didn’t have to do that. It ran flawlessly until I had the fuel pump replaced a few weeks later.

Coming Monday: “How Can I Help You?”