Keepsakes - Card Shark Book

Lately when I sit down to write entries I feel like I've written about them before. That's what I get, I suppose, for writing about keepsakes and things from the past. I have a search in my entries and sometimes I find what I'm looking for and other times I don't. Yet the feeling still nags at me, and I have to search using different words. Again, sometimes I find it and other times I don't. So if  you feel like you've read this before...too damn bad sorry.

I found this in my container and pulled it out to show my friend Kelly. She made it for me in 1989. I forgot to show it to her when she was here for our Friday TV Night so I thought I would write about it. Not that she reads my blog anymore. She is "too busy" and doesn't have "great internet service" or a "computer". So I've taken to saying, "I wrote about it on my blog" when things of interest happen and if she wants to know about it then she goes on it. Win, win for us I suppose.

I moved to Florida a couple of years after reconnecting with Kelly. She and I happened to meet up again in a college night class while we pursued, and eventually gave up on, another degree. She was living at the time back with her mother in the same neighborhood where we grew up. I was still living at home with my mother and so we began hanging out again just like we did as teenagers. But then I moved to Florida.

 

I moved there in November before my birthday. It wasn't easy to make the big transition, and truthfully, at the time I wasn't so sure it would be permanent. I arrived with a few belongings, but my heart was still in Indiana and there were many days in Florida that it was splintering. I had never been on my own before and being close to my family I had some adjustments to make. This little gift arrived at the right time in my life and it made me laugh and long for my good friend.

It had pictures of so many of our Spades tournaments in those latter years. We were obsessed and we had many parties and late night drunkenness games. My mom would always get up and do chores while someone was shuffling or dealing. She folded laundry, vacuumed, emptied the dishwasher and did other things that "had to be done". We were always yelling for her to come back and sit down and play. It got to be a huge joke which Kelly included in the book.

Kelly is very creative. She thoughtfully picked pictures to tell a story about our card days, but the accompanying dialogue is what makes the book so funny. In the beginning it starts out with us playing cards, stopping to take pictures, discussing various topics and then we have this:

This one is my favorite. "Mid-Game Lice Check". Who thinks of stuff like that from a picture. Of course, we weren't checking our hair for lice. I was obviously making pigtails and Connie was just probably holding her head up so she wouldn't fall asleep at our antics. Yet Kelly put a great spin on the photo. She's wasted her talents all these years. (That's an inside joke of ours)

Those were good times. It's keepsakes like this that remind me of the great times. Because sometimes the hear and now makes me forget the past, and I'm discovering that the past is important to get me through the hear and now.

And who knew that one day Kelly would join me to live in Florida? Sometimes the past foreshadows the future. Either way our past is part of who we are, who we have become, and who we want to be, and for me remembering and welcoming that past makes me feel like a winner.