BOOKS: Dinner-Time Reading

I've come by my curmudgeonly ways honestly, having started quite early in life. There was an affection for golden oldies/soft rock station CFRB as my radio station for life ... until The Fan 590 All-Sports radio arrived. There was the fact I skipped family vacations to do my own thing while still a tween. And I've sat apart from my family at the dinner table since before I needed two whole hands to figure out my age.

Mostly, the apart thing came from my incessant need to read. Cereal boxes at breakfast, newspapers at lunch and comic books or the like at supper. It was just me and my reading material propped up in front of me. I sat at the kitchen counter, allowing the four seats at the kitchen table to be filled by Mom, Dad, Wayne and Rick. Being the eldest child, I got first dibs on the big stool.

Now living alone in the same house, I have the kitchen table all to myself. I have set up an easel with the reading material of the day sitting there, ready to read. It's a concession to my aging eyes. I have to have it up closer to my nose now, as opposed to laying flat on the countertop when I was a kid.

Over the years, I've refined my reading habits. For the longest time, meals meant catching up with the weekly edition of The Sporting News, to be parceled out into roughly 14 reading sessions. (I had long ago stopped eating breakfast). On the occasions where the News would run short of the proscribed reading amount, or that I was having a midnight snack or two, then The Hockey News or Sports Illustrated served as a stopgap.

This worked for a long time. But then two things occurred. First, the postal system started mangling OR losing issues of TSN. The losing was the bigger of the two problems. I'd complain, get my subscription extended, but I'd be without the needed reading material. Sometimes, I'd have to read textbooks just to tide me over. Oh, the horror of it! A week or two later, I'd get two, sometimes three, and in one memorial week, FOUR issues of the weekly magazine. The hoard would be carefully cultivated to carry me through what I knew would be another fallow period in the near future.

The internet arrived and suddenly TSN and The Hockey News were no longer worth the money to subscribe. I wasn't getting anything new in their pages and the features weren't worth the money. But I STILL needed reading material.

Bridge magazines.

I have stacks and STACKS of bridge magazines. Turns out a fading memory is a boon. Reading issues from the 50's turned out to be like a brand new reading experience. Sure, I remembered SOME of the stories (I'd read them in the 80's, not the year I was born!), but the specifics were entertaining. I could compare the mechanics of bridge a half-century ago to how bridge is played today. Some of the problems that plagued players of that era, would be trifling issues to today's players.

It turned out, I had enough reading material to probably get 20 years of re-reading out of, one meal at a time. I've managed to get through the Goren age and am now up to the late 70s (when I was contributing to magazines myself in the U.S. and in India). And now, some of the stories are REALLY familiar.

I laughed out loud when I turned the page of the Bridge Magazine from Britain and saw the Victor Mollo article, The Hideous Hog and the Chartreuse Coup. I've read that one in magazine form in periodicals from BOTH sides of the Atlantic. It's also in book form at least twice, as I have two different editions of Bridge in the Menagerie. I remembered the hand and the story all too well. It was delightful.

Right now, working through Bridge Magazine issues from that decade, I'm reliving the exploits of Mollo's menagerie and the Wilson stories by P.F. Saunders. Soon, it will be time to start on the 80s editions of Bridge World from the US and a bunch of New Zealand Bridge Digests.

I look forward to each meal, as much for the nourishment as for the entertainment.