CANTANKEROUSLY YOURS

by Wendell Abern

One More Weekend at Ben’s

In perhaps four hours, the sun will set.

      It is a glorious August afternoon, the first day of poker weekend, and we sprawl languorously across the planked deck, seven overweight poker players, staring west across a glassy Lake Michigan and smoking long cigars with alluring Hispanic names. 

      Tradition dictates the first game begins when the sun sinks beneath the Chicago skyline, but we are in no hurry.

      Ben’s summer home in Michigan City, only an hour’s drive from downtown Chicago, sits atop a small hill with an unimpeded view of the lake.  We have hauled our suitcases up the 26 steep steps to Ben’s deck, along with enough deli for a small battalion.

      After ironing out all Iraqi and Pakistani problems, we have our traditional opening day drink and toast to our host, Ben.  Our only drink of the weekend.  We are an Eating Poker Game, not a Drinking One.

      “Abortion joke,” Shel announces.  “They asked a Jewish mother when life begins.  She said, ‘When my child graduates medical school.’”

      “You told that joke last year,” Ray says.

      “Yeah, but with your pathetic memories, I figured no one’d remember it.”

      Then we toast the two charter members we have lost, Dennis (ten years ago) and my brother (five years ago). 

      We toast, drink, smoke and have solved all issues dealing with abortion, then move on to Uzbekistan, the stock market, the White Sox and Cubs when Lou announces, “Dinner.” 

      Lou – our organizer, shopper and tradition-keeper – heads to the refrigerator, and starts hauling out food.  He slaps down tall stacks of corned beef, pastrami, salami, cheddar cheese, rye bread and dinner rolls on paper plates; then he sets out large cartons of potato salad and

cole slaw, surrounding them with three different kinds of mustard and green tomato dill pickles.

      “Dinner,” he yells, and we get up as one, walk into the kitchen,

make sandwiches only a lion’s mouth could accommodate, and amble back

to the deck to await sundown.

      “Gonna be a spectacular sunset,” Ben says.

      He’s right.  The sun is nearing Chicago’s three prominent skyscrapers —  Sears Tower, Standard Oil Building, John Hancock –which stick up like fuzzy gray pencils on the horizon, and the sky is already ablaze with orange and pink slashes.  Lou starts taking pictures.

        “I hate your cigars,” Ray, the only non-smoker, says.  “The smoke clings to me.  When I get home from a poker game at one in the morning, my wife won’t even let me in the bedroom until I take a shower.”

        “You don’t know how to handle your wife,” Jerry says.  “When I come home from poker, I make my wife take a shower.”

      By the time we have finished eating and solved the nation’s racial and prison problems, the sun is touching the lip of the lake, just north of the Hancock.  And it drops, as if swallowed by the horizon, disappearing in seconds.

      The game begins. 

      I look around the table and marvel, for about the thousandth time, at us.  At the improbability of us.  At the mere existence of us.

      We began playing poker together when we were ten years old.  A game every month since 1944.  Seven marriages, no divorces.  In the last

few years, five of us celebrated Golden Anniversaries.  Great kids and grandchildren, you could get obnoxious, who would blame you?  A sixty-three-year-old poker game.  Unreal.  We should call Guinness.  

      The game, which used to go until two in the morning, ends before midnight (with one fifteen-minute cigar break).  Everyone finds his usual

bed or couch, upstairs or down, and they’re all asleep in ten minutes. 

      I sit up and read.  As I trudge up to bed sometime after two, I think to myself … our poker game, the reason we get together every year, is the least important part of the weekend.

                              * * *

      On Saturday morning, the early crew (Shel, Jerry and Lou) departs for Shirley’s Diner at about 6:30, where Lou will order, “The usual,” and muddle the entire waitstaff.  They have returned by the time I get up (nine-ish), shower, and walk to the deck with my first cup of coffee.

Everyone is noshing on the coffee cake the early crew brought back from Shirley’s. 

      We spend the next hour resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis when Lou says, “Game time.”

      The morning game breaks at 11:45 for lunch:  deli left overs from last night.  The game ends at l:30, when we clean up, and Shel, Jerry, Lou and I head out to the nearby Blue Chip Casino.

      I win $235 at blackjack, Lou loses ten, Jerry wins twenty.  When I ask Shel how he fared at Three-Card Poker, he says, “Do I ask you how much money you make?” 

      When we return, everyone naps for an hour before heading out to dinner.  Every year, we go to a nearby restaurant, named – and it’s as hard for me to write this name as it is to believe it – Ben’s. 

      We return around seven.  I make coffee and we settle in for the final game, which ends a little after midnight.

      We sit on the porch, seven overweight poker players, exhausted, smoking our final cigars, talking in monosyllables, and listening to waves lapping at the sand.  At 1:15, we all go to bed.

                              * * *

      Sunday morning.  I am the last one awake.  I shower, shave, make the bed, shove clothes into my bag (none of us unpacks – we live out of suitcases) and join everyone on the porch.

      We wolf down the bagels, lox and cream cheese we brought with us on Friday, help Ben clean up, then walk carefully down the steep steps with our bags to await the annual getaway photo.  Ben joins us.

      Tradition, according to Lou, dictates we must wait for a stranger to come by to take our picture.  We wait 15 minutes before a

young woman, out cycling, pedals our way. 

      Art yells out, “They just let us out of the home for an hour.  Can you take our picture?”

      “Don’t worry,” Shel tells her as she dismounts.  “Last time anyone here was a threat to a woman’s virtue, you weren’t even an idea yet.”

      She takes several pictures of us and cycles away.  We say our goodbyes to each other with an unarticulated sadness.  It is 2007, some

of the guys aren’t well, some of the wives aren’t well, and we all sense this is The Last Game.

      Oh, the guys still get together for monthly games with some ringers they have found.  And I talk to them regularly.  But in my quiet moments, when I reminisce and chuckle to myself, I can see Lake Michigan and the

Chicago skyline, and I think to myself, my God, what I would give for just one more weekend at Ben’s.

      Cantankerously Yours,

      Wendell Abern

Wendell Abern can be reached at .