December 11 2007, 08:59 PM Last Night At 1am, Something Terrible Happened To You

As a rule, I try to keep myself innocent of how to play bridge. There are plenty of other card games, after all, and I hold a very strong memory of an Aunt leaning down to whisper in my younger ear: "do not learn to play bridge. Someone always needs a forth, and you'll never do anything else with your life." I grasp enough of it to understand when magical things happen, like when through dint of luck and skill a player manages to put down all of their cards in perfect order, with drama in every trick, to the end of wildly implausible success. I have watched such games over such shoulders, and have been enthralled. But I do not know how to play bridge.

The lore of my family (and other families too, I suspect) is that luck comes to the partners who are sitting parallel to the bathtub. The lore says nothing about the case of multiple bathtubs in strange arrangement. I think it does say something about the general quality of orthogonality we find in our lives, and how we build things to live them in. Nevertheless. Bob and Alice were lucky tonight: them were sitting parallel to the bathtub.

I have been moving through the house these months, finding out what to do with the rooms. It is looking as if next up on the list is, at long last, what can laughably be called The Master Bedroom Suite. Truth be told, it might be better described as The Big Room With Not A Lot Of Stuff In It. I have some things that I can shuffle in to make it more welcome, and I have a much better idea of how it all should sit in there now. One of my options is to spin the bed a bit against the other bed wall, so as to better see the moon through the dark leafless branches on cool winter evenings.

I would also then be sleeping parallel to the bathtub.