Some days the energy it takes to stand erect just isn’t available. But I did better than that, I even walked.  SWEET!  It’s been a rough few weeks.  I haven’t felt like I could muster much energy and couldn’t seem to wake up even after drinking gallons of coffee.  Sick…some kind of sick that’s hard to ‘esplain Lucy.’  But I’m better now.

My sis headed for North Carolina this week to visit her daughter and family — she should be back within a few days. Her and hubs were considering going back on the road because of the $ but that all changed last week when hubs got hired by a new propane company going in out here in the big city.  Good for them.  I can’t imagine hurtling back and forth across the United States day after day and getting bounced across the sleeper and cabin of a truck and then having the inconvenience of not having a potty room — all that fun should be illegal.

For some reason late this afternoon I started thinking about some of the old Montana poker games and the characters that built the foundation of poker at the start of my 35 year career of being involved with the game.

After I got into dealing (I started as a bartender), it was like watching a nonstop circus act going on around me — the only thing missing was the high wire but everyone else was in the show.

Some of it’s as funny now as it was then. We had a round of regulars that came in to play almost every day and usually picked up a few strangers during the week.  At the time I got into dealing there were only a few places in town that had poker so the players would swap out places for awhile — usually if they went bust and borrowed or cashed a bad check on one side of the street, they went to the other place until the smoke cleared.

One part of the circus act was Bill and Janet Davis coming in, Bill played and Janet sat behind him…for a while. Then Janet started to learn to play. They played in the $3/$6 LH game that ran in the back, although occasionally they took a seat in the 5 Card Stud game out front while they waited for a Hold’em seat.  They were weekend players since they had a 2nd hand store. Then, once in a while, they played during the week.

How can that be a circus act?

They also had a daughter named Carrie.  Carrie was a sweet, mentally challenged child that wore glasses and was exceptionally friendly and wholesome…about 5 or 6 when they started bringing her in with them. Since the place had a restaurant and the gaming licensing board was eccentrically twisted and had no clue what they were doing, no one ever thought to run through the door and check out the establishment late night or make sure that things were on the up and up.

So Carrie spent many a night along the wall on a row of chairs that had been pulled together with jackets for her blankets.  It was pretty disgusting.  Why didn’t I call child protection about it?  I have no idea.  I thought about it but I didn’t do it.  It irritated me that the establishment was willing to let a child sleep in the poker room until 3 or 4 in the morning but I did nothing.  Now, in the length of time it takes me to blink, I’d be looking up the number and phoning it in.

When I left the Ox for the last time, Carrie was still a regular only she was a few years older. I worried that since the Ox wasn’t one of the most reputable places on earth with the bus station next door and a big empty parking lot right out the back door, that one of the down-and-outs would end up coaxing her to leave with them.  I guess that never happened.

I always wondered if some day Carrie would learn to play poker and when her mom became to old to care for herself, if Carrie would take her to the card room and line up chairs for her to sleep on, telling her that they would head for home in a little bit. Pay backs are a bitch sometimes.

Bill and Janet were both great people, probably still are, but sometimes you get a glimpse of a person’s personality that you’d rather remained hidden.

I read a phrase on the internet the other day that I really like.  “A friend of mine called me delusional and I nearly fell off my unicorn.” Count me in.