In November of 2024 two dates were circled on everyone’s calendar. The presidential election that featured Kamala Harris (after Joe Biden was convinced to stay on the sidelines) and Donald Trump was scheduled for Tuesday, the fifth. It was difficult to imagine a pair of candidates any more different than they were. Most supporters of each considered that the election of the other would be disastrous. The experts judged it a toss-up.
The other big day was Thursday the 28th, Thanksgiving. Sue and I had been invited to Burlington, VT, to celebrate the occasion with the extended Corcoran family, but we had felt awkward at the previous such gathering that we had attended, and so we declined.
The last regional bridge tournament on the calendar in New England was scheduled for Monday the 18th through Saturday the 23rd at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The Nutmeg State had not hosted a regional tournament since February of 2019.1 I had amassed lot of hotel points for IHG, the company that owned both Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. During the summer I had unsuccessfully tried to use them for the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in September. No such rooms were available. Since the dates for the Harvest Regional in Norwich had already been published, I immediately reserved a room for all five nights and paid for it with points.
Xenia Coulter.
Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him on the first three days. Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider were looking for teammates for the Swiss team games all week.2 My other three prospective partners were fellow members of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). John Lloyd agreed to play in the bracketed pairs on Friday, and Eric Vogel committed to the Get-Away Teams on Saturday.
Xenia Coulter, who grew up in Ann Arbor, attended U-M, and lived in a town near Norwich, volunteered to play with me in the open Swiss scheduled for Thursday. Xenia and I had never played together before. We spent quite a bit of time going over the convention card via email. The HBC scheduled a special game for Veterans Day, November 11. We played together in that event and finished third out of eight, which was worth 1.34 masterpoints. I added Xenia to my list of partners, which at the time totaled 151.
Here, then, is a snapshot of my calendar for early November.
In addition to what is shown above, I also played in my regularly scheduled bridge games on the first two Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at the HBC as well as the Sunday afternoon game with Sue. I also played in the two Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). In the week before the tournament I played Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (twice), and the following Saturday. All of my preparation was relegated to the remaining three days.
The latest iteration of Covid was spreading fairly rapidly through the HBC. YL tested positive for Covid after the game on Saturday the ninth. Mike Carmiggelt. tested positive after the game on the tenth. I played against YL, but Sue and I did not play against Mike. We both wore masks because we had the sniffles. Other regular players at the HBC who reportedly had contracted Covid were Jim Macomber, Laurie Robbins, Lesley Meyers, and Bill Watson.
Wednesday, November 13: I never felt even a little sick, and by Wednesday my congestion was no worse than usual. However, Sue was much worse. She told me when I returned from the evening bridge game at about 11:00 that she had trouble breathing and could not sleep. I was very alarmed at this development. For the last few years she generally slept with a CPAP machine and supplemental oxygen. She asked me if we had any Alka Seltzer Cold Plus packets. I remembered seeing one in a drawer in my bathroom. I fetched, and she dissolved it in a glass of water and drank it.
I was already in a very bad mood. After playing two nondescript bridge games it occurred to me that I had come to enjoy the game a lot less than most of the other players. Almost everyone talked about the hands at the table, a practice that annoyed me greatly. People made the same old jokes, such as Eric’s “best for last” comment in the last round of almost every session, just to have something to say. I would have laughed if the remarks were original or funny, but I could not remember doing so even once since the lockdown. So, I had become almost completely a silent participant in club games.
Thursday, November 14: In the morning I drove to CBS and bought Sue Package of Alka Seltzer Cold Plus. It seemed to help, but she complained that it tasted terrible. I also picked up some groceries.
I had nothing of great importance scheduled for either the 14th or 15th. I am almost always worn out after the Wednesday night game. On Thursday I planned to go walking at about 2:00, but between shopping, naps and preparing supper, I never managed to do it. I had heard from Charles Schwab that one of my Treasury bills would mature on that day.
Friday, November 15: I sent out an email to the regulars at the SBC at around 8:00. It announced that there would be no more games in November and erroneously stated that the next game would be on December 3, which was a Tuesday.
I also did my cash worksheet for the rest of the month. I transferred a few thousand dollars from the Schwab account to cover the cash needed rest of the year. I discovered that I could not afford any of the T-bills that were available. I decided to buy a CD from Chase instead.
I did not find time to walk on Friday either. For the previous six weeks I had been reading a massive novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that I had checked out from the Enfield Public Library. It was certainly one of the strangest books that I had ever read. It was published in 1969, when Nabokov was 90. The two main characters, who are siblings as well as cousins, converse in French, Russian, and English, with a little Italian thrown in. The main plot is about their torrid off-and-on sexual relationship, reportedly consummated more than one thousand times! There are also many subplots, and the setting is not on Earth (called Terra in Ada), but a similar place called Antiterra3. Despite the fact that Ada had been on the shelf for fifty-five years, no one in Enfield had ever filled out the little form provided for short comments at the back of the book. I rated it as 8. My comment was “Incomprehensible but awesome.”
I finished Ada on Friday and returned it to the Library. I checked out two new books, Pnin, a much shorter and more light-hearted novel by Nabokov, and Mrs. Osmond, the only “literary” novel by John Banville on the shelves that I had not read. I was surprised to see that Banville had also published a new crime novel called The Drowned. It featured both of his pathetic sleuths, Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford.
Before going to play bridge at the HBC on Saturday I took an antihistamine to assure that I did not need to cough or blow my nose much. I wore an N95 mask. My partner, as always, was Peter Katz.
I played pretty well throughout most of the game. We finished second for the third week in a row.
My most grievous error came on the hand shown at the right. I, sitting West, passed. If the vulnerability had been reversed, I might have tried 2♦. Tom Katsouleas bid 4♠, and everyone passed. Peter led the ♠A. I played my lowest club (encouraging). Peter continued with the king and a third club, which I ruffed.
I neglected to notice that Peter led the 10 rather than the 8. I had to decide between ♥10 and ♦A. Peter had, in fact, asked me to return a heart. If I had, we would have set the contract. It would not have helped us much because the only team that beat the contract also doubled, and we did not.
Sue finally felt better. She fixed Jambalaya for supper, but she complained that she could not smell it. I ate my serving, and I even had dessert. I had been constipated for a few days, but it in no way affected my appetite.
While we ate supper I washed three pairs of bluejeans and one sweatshirt. An hour or so later Sue moved the clothes to the dryer and set it for thirty minutes. I checked them when the dryer stopped. They were all still a little damp. I put them on for ten more minutes, and I noticed that the dryer’s drum was not rotating. I had to hang the garments on the shower rod and hope that they would dry by the time that I left for Norwich on Monday.
Juan Cole was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His website was called “Informed Comment.” He specialty was the countries of the Mideast.
Sunday, November 17: I woke at around 6:00 on the morning after a good night’s sleep. Michigan’s football team had had its second bye week, and so I did not rush into my office to check the results on the Internet. I tried to think of everything that I needed to do before leaving the next morning for the tournament. Aside from packing, the most important item was to pay Cox Cable and the statement balance on my Chase IHG credit card. I had some tea and a red Delicious apple (4016) while I scrolled through the websites that I checked every morning—The New York Times and Washington Post, Doonesbury and Non Sequitur, Juan Cole, the Onion’s “opinions”, CNN, and Twitter.
I then sent out an email that corrected the date for the next game at the SBC. It was scheduled for December 4, not, as designated in Friday’s email, December 3.
After a while I had a hankering for some Bowl & Basket chicken noodle soup, an envelope of which was surely the best bargain available for $.495. Really! A box with two envelopes still cost only $.99. I always ate two bowls. On this morning, however, I could barely finish the first one. I felt a little woozy and very weak. At 8:30 I woke Sue up and immediately went back to sleep.
When I woke up an hour or two later I vomited. I drove to CVS and bought a box of ten pouches of Purelax, the store brand of polyethylene glycol 3350. I dissolved one in a glass of water, drank it, and lay down. I got up three times to go to the bathroom and each time I had a small bowel movement. I felt much better. However, the next time that I got up I vomited again. There was no way that I could drive to Norwich and play two sessions of bridge the next day if I could not keep any food down.
I called the hotel in Norwich and postponed my arrival until Tuesday. I let Abhi, Mike, and Jim know that I would not be there on Monday. For supper Sue fixed me a piece of chicken, some leftover vegetables, and two biscuits. I had no appetite. I had a few nibbles, but I uncharacteristically left most of it on my plate. I did not vomit.
My negative result is on top. Sue’s positive one is below.
Monday, November 18: I did not rise from bed on Monday, the first day of the tournament, until after 8:00. Sleeping that late was extremely unusual for me. When I woke Sue up she informed me that she had tested positive for Covid. I was not surprised. Her coughs had diminished only a little, and she was still quite congested. She also said that she could not smell the Jambalaya. Her doctor advised her that if I tested negative, I should get the Covid booster and the flu shot.
I ate two bowls of soup. I ate most of a sleeve of crackers over a period of a few hours. I took the second sleeve of Purelax. It seemed to work pretty well. I felt somewhat better, but I had little energy, and I could not concentrate. Although I did not vomit all day, I canceled my hotel reservations and let Abhi, Jim, Mike, John, Xenia, and Eric know that I would not be coming. So, I would be on a “staycation” until at least Tuesday the 26th.
Sue and I watched TV all evening. Our chairs are ten feet apart, and I wore my N95 mask whenever I was around her.
Tuesday, November 19: My energy was better, but I doubted that I could have mustered the power of concentration necessary for two sessions of tournament-level bridge. I slept most of the day, but I had no other symptoms.
In the afternoon I drove to ShopRite and Stop and Shop and bought almost $50 worth of groceries. The most important purchases were the restocking of my personal staples that I had allowed to get very low because I expected to be at the tournament—Caffeine-free Diet Coke, soup, brats, apples, and potato chips.
I tried to schedule an emissions inspection for Sue’s car for Wednesday, but no one answered the phone at The Mad Hatter at 4:45. They reportedly closed at five.
Wednesday, November 20: I tested myself for Covid right after I awoke. The result was clearly negative. Sue spent most of the day in bed, as she had been doing for a week or so. She could breathe OK, but she was still very stuffy and had even less energy than usual.
I drove Sue’s Subaru Forester to The Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Only one other customer was inside, and he was not there for an emissions test.
What a throwback this place was. Three very stoic guys came in and out. The one who took my $20 and key seemed to be in charge, but the other guy who stood at the cash register might have been a partner. There was no one under 40.
I began to suspect that I might have had a very light case of Covid when my nose was running constantly on Sunday. Sue’s case is certainly not light.
The seven remaining envelopes of Purelax.
Thursday, November 21: I still did not feel “regular”. I therefore drank a third sleeve of Purelax.
I made an appointment for a flu shot and a Covid booster at Walgreens at 3:30. However, the questionnaire that I filled in online asked if I had been in close contact with anyone with Covid in the last fourteen days. When I answered in the affirmative, the program said that I was not eligible for the shots.
The pharmacy it the all-brick area to the right of the last awning.
Sue called Jason, the pharmacist at Walgreens. He advised her to tell me to answer the “close contact” question in the negative and to then fill out and submit the rest of the form. Unfortunately, I could not find a way on the web page to add my patient info to the existing appointment, and so I made a new appointment for 4pm.I arrived at Walgreens shortly after 3:30. I explained the situation to the lady at the counter. About ten minutes later she administered one shot in each of my muscle-bound arm. I did not even feel the first one. This was different from the previous occasion in that she did not ask me to wait around afterwards for fifteen minutes to see if I had an adverse reaction, and she never asked for my insurance card.
It rained for the first time in several months, but Enfield received less than an inch.
The heater in my car was not working again. I had tried every combination of settings. Nothing seemed to work. This happened in 2023. On that occasion I took it into Lia Honda. After a few minutes they told me that there was nothing wrong with it. It functioned correctly for the rest of the winter.
Friday, November 22: I slept until 8:10. I awoke after a very vivid dream about driving in the snow. I was behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler that contained file cabinets. It crashed because someone tried to get an oversized load through a snow-covered narrow road and got stuck. After the crash someone drove off with my tractor-trailer. Incidentally, I have never driven a truck of any kind. I did drive a pickup in the army. I got into trouble when I moved it without fastening the seat belt. That maneuver involved a journey of less than 50 feet that began and ended in a parking lot. An Air Force captain chewed me out for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Both arms were a little sore when I woke up, but I was in no way impaired.
Sue ordered some food from Olive Garden. I drove there and picked up the bag.It cost a little over $50 with the tip. I parked in pick-up space #6. To my left was space #8. To the left of that was space #7. Go figure.
In the afternoon I received a phone message from Lynn Duncan, a bridge player from the Boston area, asking me to play in the Swiss in Norwich on Saturday. I wondered if a card for me was on the partnership desk. I was probably feeling good enough to play, but I could not risk attending when Sue was sick. She was feeling better, but she still spent a lot of time in bed.
Saturday November 23: I walked six laps (3.33 miles) in the Mall. Santaland was up set up very nicely in front of the old entrance to JC Penney, but there were very few walkers or shoppers. Haven Games was the only place that was busy. I probably could have done the remaining three laps, but I did not want to overdo it.
U-M defeated Northwestern 50-6. That gave the Wolverines a 6-5 record going into the final game with Ohio State. It also clinched a slot in a bowl game.
Sunday November 24: I walked 5 miles outside, two laps of my usual circuit. It was 51° when I started and 45° when I finished. I noticed that the pine tree behind the fence at the corner of School St. and North St. that suffered from the same disease as the one that had blown over in our yard had broken in two. A ten-foot tall stump remained.
It never occurred to me to examine the results from the bridge tournament that I had just missed.
Monday November 25: I walked 4 miles outside. The weather was very nice, but a bit of pain in the lower right section of my back led me to cut off one mile by turning onto School St. from Hazard Ave. Still, I managed to walk 12.33 miles in three days, a post-Covid record.
Tuesday November 26: The staycation was over. For the first time in more than a week I drove on the highway. There was not much sunshine. I resolved to make an appointment for my car’s heating problems when I returned. I was pleased to see that the price of a sausage biscuit with egg at the McDonald’s was still $5.25 (including tax).
Geof Brod.
I played bridge with John C. We did badly. I overheard Sally Kirtley tell Geof Brod that the attendance at the regional tournament in Norwich was not very good. She also mentioned that approximately 90 tables worth of people played in an online regional that ran from the 18th through the 20th. The tournament’s flyer has been posted here. Geof remarked that it had not occurred to him that the ACBL was competing with regionals. This had long been obvious to me. Incidentally, no other district had scheduled a regional during this period.
Just before supper I watched episode 7 of Reindeer Mafia.4
1. I started playing bridge at regional tournaments in 2006. For the next fifteen years a regional had been held in February in Cromwell, CT. One was scheduled for 2020, but only a week or two before the event the Red Lion Hotel was closed by the state for failure to pay taxes. The tournament was hurriedly moved to Sturbridge, MA, that year.
2. The flyer and schedule for the tournament have been posted here. It included no knockouts, and the only bracketed games—in which all participants played against people with similar levels of experience—were pairs games on Friday and team games on Sunday. I intended to complain about this when the Tournament Scheduling Committee reported at the Executive Committee meeting in Warwick in September. However, the TSC presented no report. So, I tried to make my point at the end of the meeting, but no one was paying attention because we were being pressured to play in the evening side game. I was just told that they wanted to emphasize the NAP and the bracketed pairs.
3. Antiterra was described as a sort of inside-out version of Terra. The two calendars were out of kilter a bit. Antiterra had banned electronic technology. The telephone system, which was invented by the deranged aunt of the two principal characters, was somehow based on water.
4. A description of this streamed series from Finland can be found here.
My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here. On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my … Continue reading →
My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here.
On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my responsibilities in these and other matters involving communications are detailed here. This was a great relief for me. Some of the emails that I had sent in the previous few months promoted online events that paid gold masterpoints. Each one made me cringe.
On the same day Dan Jablonski finally sent me an email casting the deciding vote in the Weiss-Bertoni award. You can read the details and discover who won the award in this blog entry.
On the 17th I mowed the lawn for the second time. The high pollen content of some areas of the yard made it somewhat difficult, as it has in every May for the last decade or two, but I completed the task without resting.
June
On June 1 I tried to beat the heat by departing for my 5-mile walk at 8:30AM. I nevertheless found it as much as I could bear,1 and there was precious little shade. I noticed that the SmartFuel gas station on the north side of Hazard Ave. near the South Road intersection had closed after only a few months of operation. It replaced the Shell station that had occupied the location for decades. Signs said that it would become a Big Y Express station.
Raveis Realty, located in a house a little bit to the east of of the station, has also apparently one year. A few years earlier a spectacular display of tulips appeared near the west side of the Raveis building.
Zillow’s photo of 2 Park St.
The corner house on Park St. (the street address is 2) is somewhat mysterious. It had appeared empty with no “For Sale” sign for months. I saw two girls there the previous week. It seemed empty again on this occasion.
In the last quarter-mile I was passed by a female walker. I was pretty sure that that had never happened to me before. I did not like it, but I was too exhausted and hot to try to hold her off. My speed and endurance both decreased noticeably as I got older.
It was still very hot on the 2nd, but then it turned much cooler with a misty rain. I attended both days of the sectional in Johnston, RI, and played with Abhi Dutta. Details have been recorded here.
On June 7 forest fires in Canada were causing in the local area thick haze from the smoke. It was quite eerie and absolutely unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Two days later the air quality still poor.
I learned that day I should have closed my dad’s IRA account at Country Club Bank in Kansas City earlier. There was not much money in it, but it took weeks to get them to send me a check. .Deidra Tossato finally sent me the form fifteen days after I requested it.
The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) scheduled an individual game for June 20, the first day of of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I played at the HBC, but I did not enjoy myself, and I did not score well. My adventures in Nashua are recorded here.
On June 28 I played with two new partners—Jim Macomber at the HBC in the morning and Barb Gallagher at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in the evening.
On June 29 and 30 my nose ran all day. Despite this I had no trouble sleeping. I had no fever or any other symptoms of Covid-19.
July
I woke up on July 1 after ten consecutive hours of sleep, close to my all-time record. I experienced a little dizziness when I arose from bed, but it disappeared shortly thereafter. I tested negative for Covid-19 using the rapid antigen test that the federal government supplied for free.
Sue’s cousin from Michigan (on the Locke side) was in town. Sue visited with her, but I did not go. We visited her, her parents, and her sisters on our trip to Michigan in 2008, as described here.
Up to nine inches of rain fell in sections of western Connecticut on July 10, but Enfield received hardly any. The weather definitely seemed more extreme in the twenties, but it is still rather mild in southern New England.
The next morning the temperature dropped to 66° at 4:30. It was the first time that it had been below 70° in weeks. It rose to 90° that day and much hotter on the next. There was no bridge game at the SBC on either the 5th or the 12th.
On July 13 at 5:44AM the bookshelf in my bedroom came crashing down. It missed my head by about two inches. If it had hit me, I would have been seriously injured. The shelf disappeared into the black hole of Sue’s “sewing room”.
On July 14 thunderstorms began at 2:30AM. Flooding wreaked havoc in the northwest part of the state. The Connecticut River was 6′ above the flood level. Damage, however, was minimal.
John Willoughby, the president of the HBC, died on July 14. Both Sue and I had been his occasional bridge partner. I worked with him on the Planning Committee when he was the vice-president.
On the following day I heard Steve Jarmoc, a local farmer and ex-politician, on the radio complaining that the flooding in Enfield had caused him crop damage. The land around our house, which was perhaps two miles from his farm, was absolutely dry. Furthermore, Jarmoc mostly grew tobacco—an addictive drug that caused cancer and other ailments. In the previous few years he had converted much of his land to fields filled with solar panels. I seriously doubt that he suffered much damage, and what if he did? Every business suffered occasional setbacks.
I had a horrible bridge day on July 23. Donna Feir reported that the HBC now had 415 members2. It was 89° and sunny when I left after the conclusion of the Board of Trustees meeting. Up to 91° on I-91. By the time that I reached home it had fallen to 68°, and it was raining buckets. I was very relieved to find that there was no flooding in our basement.
August
On August 3 I discovered a document with my notes about the San Diego vacation that Sue and I took with Sue in March of 2006. In the evening I also found a paper bag with flyers and souvenirs from the same trip. I deleted the 1,000+ words that I had previously written about this adventure and started the entry, which you can read here, anew. It was rather thrilling to relive that week.
On the next day I walked five miles in the Enfield Square Mall. A strange new store, Da Money Pit, had opened. They seemed to sell sneakers, ball caps, and sweatshirts.3 The sneakers on display were wrapped in plastic, for no obvious reason that I could see. My “ghost walks” in the mall have been detailed here.
On the 5th the HBC held a memorial to honor John Willoughby. One dog and lots of people, including a surprising number of children, who were relatives or friends of John’s attended.
The next day I learned that Maria Van Der Ree, who was over ninety, had Covid-19. She recovered within a reasonable period of time.
At the HBC John Calderbank and I had a 54 percent game on August 8. That was by far our best performance up to that time. On the next day I scored 58% at the HBC with Barb Gallagher. There was no game in Simsbury because we only five pairs registered to play.
On August 9 the big news was about the devastating fire on Maui. The most destruction was in my favorite town, Lahaina, where 217 buildings destroyed or damaged. The gigantic tree that was the symbol of the town was badly damaged, but there was hope that it would recover.
Mark Oettinger.
On the same day I learned that Mark Oettinger had “resigned” as vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference. I later learned that Peter Marcus and his friends had pretty much forced him out at a meeting of the Tournament Scheduling Committee that I was unable to attend. This news saddened me greatly. I liked and respected Mark.
On August 12-13 I played in the Western Mass sectional in Great Barrington. That adventure has been described here.
On my birthday I played with the woman whom I had been mentoring. Fran Gurtman (introduced here). We did not do well. Sue bought me three shirts and some shorts from Kohl’s. Sue and I ate supper at Francesco’s in Suffield. I ordered Linguini d’Alessandro, which was chicken, sausage, peppers, mushrooms in wine sauce. I really enjoyed it.
On August 23 Sue brought cake to Eno to celebrate my birthday, but she did not arrive until just after 6:15. We had 4 tables.
On August 24 Fran and I had a 52 percent game, which was an improvement of 18 percentage points in our previous game. I made a costly mistake on the last hand.
On August 26 fifteen pairs came to the HBC for the Saturday afternoon game. We played a Swiss with 7.5 tables. It was the biggest turnout on Saturday by far since the pandemic. Peter Katz and I had a 76.1 percent game, by far my best score ever. More details can be found here.
The Ocean State Regional tournament was held August 29-September 1 in Warwick, RI. My adventures there have been cataloged here.
September
September must have been a boring month. The only notes that I recorded concerned the loss of my Costco Visa card from Citi. The details of this remarkable event have been recorded here.
The University of Michigan football team, one of the favorites for the national championship, started the year with five easy victories. They defeated East Carolina 30-3, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas 35-7, Bowling Green 31-6, Rutgers 31-7, and Nebraska 45-7.
Coach Jim Harbaugh did not participate in the first three games because he had purchased lunch4 for a prospective player. Four interim head coaches were assigned. Jesse Minter coached the first game and Sherrone Moore the second. Jay Harbaugh (Jim’s son) and Mike Hart each coached for one half in the third game. A random co-ed could have coached for all three games, and Michigan would still have won them all easily.
October
On October 3 and 4 I moved all of my programs and data files from my Lenovo desktop that was running Windows 10 to the Asus computer running Windows 11. I documented the experience here.
On October 10 I discovered that Windows did not want me to use Shuffling, the Dutch program that I had downloaded to creates pbn files. I did anyway. However, I also received an error in Dealmaster Pro. I had to reconnect the Lenovo box and run it there. This problem was fixed, but I did not record how.
I decided not to play with Alan Godes at the regional tournament in Marlborough. It turned out that he could not play on the only day that I needed a partner. I asked Ros Abel to play in the sectional in Orange, but she was not available. .
As usual, I started my preparation for lunch by boiling water for ShopRite’s store brand of chicken noodle soup. I was shocked to discover that the package contained no noodles at all. I have opened hundreds of these packages over the years, but this had never happened before.
This box in question bore the ShopRite brand, but at some point in the year the store stopped selling the product. A short time later a new brand called Bowl & Basket appeared. The price of a box containing two envelopes of soup was $.99 before the pandemic. As of October of 2024 the price had not changed, and the quality and quantity of the contents remained the same, at least apparently. I could not name another food item of any description that maintained its pre-pandemic price.
I woke Sue up at 6:30AM on October 11: She was scheduled for jury duty in Hartford. She left the house at 8:08. When she arrived she learned that her service was not needed. That evening Kathie Ferguson returned to the SBC on that same evening after a lengthy illness..
Throughout the last few months my car had repeatedly flashed the message that one of my tires was low on air. In the past this had happened once or twice a year. On those occasions I had just brought my car into Lia (without an appointment), and told them about the message. They checked all four tires, filled whichever one was low, and I drove away. The process took perhaps fifteen minutes.
On October 23 I brought it in to Lia Honda again. Because it had happened several times in the recent past, I asked the mechanic to tell me which tire was low. He reported that one of the tires needed patching and told me to sit in the waiting area. After 2.5 hours the work was completed, but the attendant told me that there was a problem with the brakes. I made an appointment for three days later to address this problem, which necessitated spending another few hours in the waiting area.
On October 27-29 the Connecticut Bridge Association held its fall sectional in Orange, CT. The details are posted here.
After only one day of rest I attended the regional tournament in Marlborough, MA. It ran from October 31-November 4. My thoughts about this event have been recorded here.
The Wolverine juggernaut continued with three more easy victories. They defeated Minnesota 52-10, Indiana 52-7, and Michigan State 49-0.
November
On November 16 I sent a recap of the attendance at the sectional in Orange. I have posted it here. The only person who responded to it was Cindy Lyall, who agreed with my assessment.
From left: Jan, the drummer, Peggy, the bass player, and Patty.
On the next evening my wife Sue talked me into attending a concert by the Patti Tuite band at the public library in Ellington. Although I was not crazy about the music, which was mostly blues, I definitely appreciated the skill of the two main musicians—Jan on the synthesizer, flute, and key-tar and Peggy on the alto sax, violin, and harmonica.The band also had a guy on bass guitar and a female drummer. The one number that I really liked was an instrumental with a complex melody that was unlike anything else that they did. Sue liked the entire performance. Patti announced the name of it, but my notes did not record it.
On November 18 I emailed to members of the Executive Committee my attendance analysis for the tournament in Marlborough. It has been posted here. Both of these reports required quite a bit of work because I no longer had access to the ACBL’s files that provided attendance information in a comprehensive fashion.
On the next day Sue and I decided not to drive up to Burlington, VT, to visit with the Corcorans on Thanksgiving. They had invited us much earlier. However, their house would be full of relatives, and we would probably be “fifth wheels.” We felt our of place the last time that we joined them.
On November 22 my Honda warned me that the battery on the fob was low. Over the next two days Sue located a suitable batter. I managed to replace the old one without much difficulty.
November 23 was Thanksgiving. Sue cooked a turkey. We ate our meals on TV trays and tried to think of something that we should be thankful for. I did not record that anything occurred to us.
A very strange thing happened in the last round of the game at the HBC on November 29: Eric Vogel and I were playing against Tom Gerchman and Lea Selig. After the bidding Tom announced that his integrity was intact because his partner Lea Selig bid 6♥, not he. He then disclosed that he had previously overheard Mike Carmiggelt talking about the hand.
I put my cards in the carrier, said “I quit”, got in my car, and drove home. Tom later sent me an email in apology. I replied, “No harm, no foul.”
That same night Ken made many strange bids at the SBC game. He invited to game knowing that we had a maximum of 24 points and only 8 trumps. I recorded that I did not see how the SBC would be able to hold any games in December. I was right. All of the games for the month were canceled.
Michigan finished its Big 10 season with four more victories to finish the regular season undefeated and ranked #3. They defeated Purdue 41-13, Penn State 24-15, Maryland 31-24, and Ohio State 30-24. Sherrone Moore was the head coach on the sidelines for the last three games because Harbaugh was suspended because of a ludicrous sign-stealing incident engineered by a rogue staff member named Connor Stalions.
December
The new month was welcomed by the first flower on the larger Christmas cactus that had been in Denise Bessette’s office. The other one displayed its first flower on the 18th.
On December 2 Michigan shut out Iowa 26-0 in the Big 10 Championship game. It was U-M’s third consecutive win in that game, and the tenth consecutive win for the team representing the East Division. Michigan, now seeded #1, was scheduled to play Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals in the Rose Bowl on January 1. There was some controversy because Alabama was chosen to play over undefeated Florida State despite the fact that the Tide had lost to Texas in September.
The temperature on December 15 and 16 reached the fifties. I walked five miles outside on both afternoons.
I learned on December 17 that Eric Vogel had contracted Covid. I wore a mask at bridge all week.
On December 20 the electrical connection for my cellphone’s charger stopped working. I had to plug the cable into a USB port on Asus. This was only a minor inconvenience; Asus has many ports, four of which are in front. I was astounded to learn that Sue had no recollection of my previous phone dying while I was on the 2022 cruise that has been described in detail here. We went to the Verizon store together, and the salesman showed me that the Pixel 2 I had been using was swollen in the middle. He said that it was probably dead. A little later Sue bought me a refurbished Sony Galaxy. I found this lapse of memory quite concerning.
On December 29 I received an mail from someone named Frank Wilson5 asking about downloading a zip or pdf file of Stupid Pope Tricks. I tried to reply to his reply address, fdmw@gmail.com, but it was blocked because the address was not valid. I had no idea what that was about.
On the next day I (and many others) received a shocking email from Peter Marcus that indicated that he was resigning from all his posts in the New England Bridge Conference. This reportedly had something to do with scheduling conflicts with another district”s tournament.
1. At least once in the nineties I ran more than five miles when it was over 100°. When I was in my twenties I considered no temperature to be too hot for any athletic endeavor. Boy, has that changed!
2. It was incredible to me that the HBC did not actually know how many people were officially members. Eventually, I wrote a set of programs that would allow the club to keep track of the membership—dues, contact information, and other things. The story of that system is documented here. The number of members exceeded 500 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.
3. The store is still open in October of 2024, but in all my trips to the mall I had seen fewer than a handful of customers.
4. This infraction was widely ridiculed by Michigan fans and called Hamburgergate. It was common knowledge that many large programs arranged for players to be paid under the table. By 2023 the NCAA had ceded the rights to the names, images, and likenesses (called NIL) of the players to the players themselves. By the next year some of them were earning upwards of $1 million to play their favorite sport for a few months out of the year.
5. Of course, I immediately thought that this might be J. Frank Wilson, who, with support from the Cavaliers, in 1964 recorded the remake of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss”. It made it to #2 on Billboard.
By the end of 2022 Americans were still contracting Covid-19, but very few died or became seriously ill. Most people had either contracted the virus already at least once or had been immunized with boosters. I still wore an N95 mask outside of the house for the first few months, but by the end of that period few people joined me.
January
For decades I have been an avid college football fan. New Years Day was ordinarily one of my favorite days. In 2023, however, it fell on a Sunday. The semifinals of the four-team College Football Playoff had occurred on December 31 Only pro games, in which I had little interest, were held on January 1. I was in my office in Enfield for most of the day.
On Monday, January 2, I played with Nancy Calderbank as part of the mentoring program at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She had asked me to coach her through the transition from Standard American to Two-Over-One (2/1). Our results were not very good that day, but there was one memorable hand, which is shown at the right.
I had the dubious privilege of holding the cards in the East hand. When I received a miserable collection like that one, I like to add up the number of pips that are on my cards. In this case the total was 59, the second-lowest that I have ever seen.1 What made it really amazing was that more than half of the pips were clubs. Also, if deuces were aces, threes kings, etc., this hand would be worth 30 high card points. West’s monstrosity has only 70 percent of that number.
On the day after this bridge game I learned that one of my regular partners, Peter Katz, and an occasional partner of both Sue and me, Fred Gagnon, had contracted Covid-19 over the holidays. Neither became seriously ill, and both were back at the tables within a week or two.
On January 5 I sent the first email to the committee for the Weiss-Bertoni Award. The details of this project have been chronicled here.
The garbage disposal in the new kitchen had been stopped up. Apparently it was my fault. Sue said that all fat and grease must be removed with a paper towel before scraping the garbage from plates and cooking utensils into the sink. A plumber came out and fixed it on the 14th. He returned three days later to address a leak under the sink in the old kitchen. Tennessee Ernie Ford came to mind.
On the 15th I started work on a third-person autobiography entitle Cowboy Coder from Kansas. When the blog entry for this project is completed, I will link it here.
My wife Sue informed me that someone had told her years ago that we could get a break on our real estate tax because I am a veteran. That program exists, and we might have been able to use it in the first few years that we lived in Enfield, but our income, which is primarily from social security, seemed much too high.
On January 18 Sue was in a funk all day.. She played at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Maria Van Der Ree in the evening game. Even though they came in last out of eight pairs, Sue seemed chipper at the end. She needs to be out with people much more than I do.
The infamous Tonto email went out on the 19th. The tale is told here.
Bob: Several early entries in the 2023 notes for the pandemic concern the demise of Sue’s cat, Bob, our last surviving pet. The notes for January 3 reported: “Bob drools a lot and smells bad. Sue gave him a bath of some kind, but his saliva is rancid. He sleeps most of the time, but he bothers Sue when he is awake.”
The litter box in the basement. The grey items near the box are pieces of litter that absorbed water when the basement flooded. The water later evaporated.
We had cats in Enfield from the time that they moved there. Throughout this period all of them were able to use the cat door installed in a basement window to go outside when they felt like it. They could be relied on to make use of it whenever they needed to relieve themselves. However, in 2022 it became necessary to make a litter box available to them. At first it was in the basement. By the beginning of 2023 I had to move it upstairs because Bob was no longer able to negotiate the stairs.
Bob finally died on January 28. In some ways it was a sad occasion, but neither Sue nor I thought that he enjoyed the last few months of his life the way that our other cats seemed to.
Sue and I get a reminder about Bob every evening at 8:55. Her phone announces “Eight fifty-five Meds Slash Bob”. We call this announcement “Slash Bob.”
February
The coldest day of the year, by far was February 4. It approached 0 in Connecticut, but it was much colder on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The temperature was 8 below but the windchill index was an incredible -109° Fahrenheit.
February 7 was the first day of the regional bridge tournament in Southbridge, MA. Sue played with Mark Aquino in the Open Pairs. They did not do well. My adventures in the tournament have been described here.
In Sue’s absence I took my car in for the emissions test at Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Afterwards I calculated that we would owed $500 in income tax for 2022. The biggest reason for this was the cost of the cruise (described here) that necessitated a fairly large distribution from my 401K.
On February 10, only six days after that extremely cold day, the temperature reached a balmy 62°.
March
The first post-pandemic limited sectional was held at the HBC on March 26. It drew an incredible fifty-seven tables. The whole story is revealed here.
“Donald, my book will be coming out soon.”
On March 30 Donald Trump was indicted by the state of New York on 31 counts of business fraud! The indictments were in regard to Trump, through his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $150,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair during the run-up to the election. Trump misused corporate funds to reimburse Cohen. That is what made it a crime in New York, which was, at that time, the official location of the companies. It was being filed as a felony because it was an illegal attempt to influence an election, which was a felony in New York.
An important Zoom meeting was held for replacement of the relational database that I had designed and implemented for the district. Details of that meeting have been posted here.
April
The income tax situation worked out better than my preliminary calculation had indicated. I had to pay the IRS $181. However, we received a refund from CT of $1996 I used one of the free filing services, but I had to pay $15 to file electronically in CT.
For the 2023 National Debate Tournament, U-M’s top team of Rafael Pierry and Kelly Phil won the Copeland award and were seeded #1 in the tournament. I could hardly believe that seven assistant coaches were going to attend the tournament in Chantilly, VA. Pierry and Giorgio Rabbini had also won the Copeland award in 2022 and were second in 2021.
Pierry and Phil.
Pierry and Phil were 7-1 in the preliminary rounds with 21 out of a possible 24 ballots. The U-M second team of Rabbini and Joshua Harrington also was 7-1 with only one fewer ballot. Pierry and Phil made it to the final round, but they lost to Wake Forest. Pierry attained the final round in three consecutive years, an achievement that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime. I was nearly as disappointed with this result as I was with my own failure to qualify for the NDT in 1970, as described here.
There was quite a bit of activity about the Weiss-Bertoni award.
On Saturday, April 8, we went to see Tom, Casey, and Brian Corcoran in Tom’s house in Wethersfield. When we came back I found a dead mouse in the toilet of the bathroom in the older part of the house. I set traps the next day, but I caught nothing. Some mysteries are never solved.
On April 13 the temperature reached 90°. I walked five miles, but I had to stop, rest in the shade, and cool off three times. The next day it reached an incredible 96°, breaking the previous record by fourteen degrees. That temperature was never exceeded in the summer months.
The first CBA sectional was held in Orange on the 21st through the 23rd. I played all three days. Descriptions of my adventures were posted here. My most memorable achievement was the 512 miles that my Honda logged on a tank of gas. It took over 13 gallons when I filled it, but it claimed that it could have gone another fifteen miles. .
May
It was about this time that I discovered Bosch on Freevee. Sue and I watched it nearly every evening, and it didn’t cost us a penny. This and other ventures into the land of streaming are cataloged here. We could not believe that Amazon, which purchased the service from IMDB, was allowing people to view this high-quality police dram for free.
It was very hot on May 1 when I mowed the portions of the lawn that face either North Street or Hamilton Court. I was not able to mow the rest until three days later.
On May 8 I volunteered to send out the HBC’s emails for the summer through MailChimp. Lori Leopold had been doing it, but she had a lot of travel scheduled for the upcoming months. I somehow also was saddled with creating the official calendar from Donna’s handwritten version.
On May 11 the national health emergency for the pandemic officially ended. For several months I continued wearing my mask wherever I was likely to be in fairly close contact with others.
The day-by-day blog entry for the rest of 2023 has been posted here.
1. The lowest total that I have ever seen was an incredible 53 at the Simsbury Bridge Club fairly early in my bridge career. Unfortunately, although I often had my camera with me in those days, I did not record this event, and no hand record was available because the SBC was not yet using a dealing machine.
My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.
I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.
I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.
January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.
Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.
On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.
On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.
On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.
At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.
On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.
I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.
The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.
On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.
I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.1
On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.
The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.
I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.
On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.
The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.
On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards
I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.
On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.
Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.
On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.
On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.
Not a litter box.
On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.
Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.
On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.
On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.
On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.
The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.
I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC2 games a week apart.
On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.
On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.
On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.
There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.
Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.
On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.
I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”3 It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.
February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.
In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.
On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.
On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.
February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.
The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.
On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook. Good luck and great to hear from you!”
Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.
On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.
On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “
That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.
On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.
At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.
On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.
On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.
On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.
On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.
In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his ♠A.
March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.
On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.
On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.
On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.
By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.
On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters
On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4♥ against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3♦.
On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.
On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.
The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.
On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.
He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.
In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.
I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.
A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.
April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.
Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.
Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.
On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.
On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers
On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.
On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.
On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.
The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.
May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.
That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.
I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.
I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.
The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.
On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.
Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.
The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.
I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.
We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.
On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.
June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.
On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.
On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.
On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”
I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.
The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.
From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!
On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.
Graham Van Keuren.
On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.
On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.
July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.
The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.
August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.
On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.
Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.
A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.
I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.
On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.
I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.
August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.
September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.
On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.
After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.
On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.
On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.
The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.
On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.
Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.
Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.
Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.
Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.
We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.
On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.
October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.
Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.
On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.
On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.
On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.
On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.
November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.
On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.
In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.
I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!
The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.
11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:
I hope that you are all doing well.
I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.
Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.
I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.
December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.
December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.
Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.
On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!
However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.
December 12 brought the first snow of the season.
At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.
On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.5 I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.
On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.
On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.
The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.
We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,6 but I didn’t.
Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.
On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.
On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.
A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.
1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.
2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.
3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.
4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.
5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.
6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.
On Saturday, January 25, 2003, a momentous event occurred in my life. I was, as usual, working in my office at TSI in East Windsor. My Bose radio was tuned to the local NPR station. I don’t remember what I was working on, but I do remember Scott Simon’s interview of A. J. Jacobs on Weekend Edition about his quest to become the smartest person in the world by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end. On that show he reported that he had just finished reading the letter H. To my surprise and delight the entire interview has been posted here.
A. J. Jacobs.
Most of the conversation concerned the account that he read in the F volume concerning the corpse of the ninth-century Pope Formosus, which was disinterred and put on trial in January of 897 by a subsequent pope named Stephen1. Jacobs described the occasion as it was depicted in 1870 in a famous painting by Jean-Paul Laurens called The Cadaver Synod. Having been found guilty, Pope F was excommunicated and defrocked. The thumb and forefinger that he used for consecrating the host were broken off. His skeleton was dumped in the Tiber. All of Pope F’s decrees and investitures were declared invalid.
That is all that Jacobs mentioned, but it was not, as I soon discovered, the end of the affair. The rest of the shocking story has been related in Chapter 5 of my book Stupid Pope Tricks, which can be read here.This radio show had a startling impact upon my life. Although I had attended Catholic schools for twelve years, I suddenly realized that I knew embarrassingly little about Church history. I could name all of the popes of my lifetime, and I knew that the first one was St. Peter himself. In between was a large blank slate. I had never heard of Formosus or Stephen, and I wondered if perhaps A. J. Jacobs had not gotten the story quite right.
U-M has many libraries. This one is the largest.
So, I got no more work done that day or the next. I was too busy googling and reading. I soon discovered that an enormous number of entire books had been scanned by Google in a project that defied belief. At the time the company had nearly finished scanning all the books at the University of Michigan’s enormous library2. The ones that were in the public domain were available online in toto and free. Almost every work in which I was interested was available at my fingertips. If I googled “Formosus”, every reference in every one of these books showed up, and, best of all, there were no ads cluttering up the search because no one had named a product or company after the poor fellow.
I started with Pope Formosus and worked backwards and forwards. I eventually realized that all written records of that period were quite suspect, but what Jacobs reported seemed to be pretty accurate, at least as far as anyone knew. One of the first additional things that I discovered was that shortly after the notorious incident Pope Stephen VI was strangled by a mob of the supporters of Pope F. Jacobs did not mention that both of the principals in the story were pontiffs in the first century of the era that lasted for more than a thousand years in which the pope was the ruler of a strip of land in central Italy that stretched from coast to coast. Their conflict was more political than theological.
The catechism that we used in parochial school promulgated the idea that the papacy had been an unbroken chain of successors to St. Peter. That notion did not survive the weekend in my new level of understanding. Duplications—when two or more men claimed to be pope at the same time—and gaps of several years when no one was recognized as pope were evident. The pope is, by definition, the Bishop of Rome, but for seventy years in the fourteenth century no pope ever set foot in Rome. They lived in Avignon in France and were absentee landlords for tens of thousands of Italians. I was also astonished to learn than during the first millennium of the papacy there wasn’t even agreement upon how the successor to a dead pope should be chosen. Some were appointed by kings or emperors.
I had previously assumed that most popes had been saints. The official Church position has always been that the Holy Spirit has inerrantly guided the cardinals (or whoever) who elected or appointed them. The popes at the top of the chronological list (about whom almost nothing is known beyond names and dates because all records were destroyed at the beginning of the fourth century) were considered saints, but at the time that I began my research only three popes3 had been canonized in the last one thousand years! One pope, John XII, was apparently not even a teenager yet when he became Supreme Pontiff, and once he became pope he was, according to all accounts, pretty much out of control.
I discovered so much remarkable material during those first few days that I struggled to make any sense of it. I searched diligently to find a book that put the various anecdotes together in a comprehensive way that explained the evolution of the office in a way that an outsider could understand. Everything that I found was severely lacking. Some simply parroted the “unbroken chain” line or just emphasized what churches were constructed during their reigns. Others were diatribes against specific popes.
Reluctantly I began putting together a timeline of my own and tried to compile the materials so that I could make sense of the big picture.
I decided to assemble and write what I had learned, starting with a two-thousand-year timeline. It was an extremely long project, but I judged that it would be interesting to others. After all, there were approximately a billion Catholics in the world. Most of them were surely as ignorant of papal history as I had been. The spiritual lives of all of them were ruled by the pope in Rome. It made sense that a significant percentage of these Catholics—not to mention the millions who, like myself, had grown up as Catholics but had “fallen away”—would be interested in learning the many remarkable things that I had discovered.
The original book had nine very long chapters. The emphasis was on how the personalities of the individual popes and the forces of history combined to provide the fascinating story of the survival of the institution, which had property and authority but no standing army, for two thousand years. I don’t remember what the original title was.
When I was nearly finished, I bought a book at Barnes and Noble that had contained a list of names and addresses of literary agents. From that I made a spreadsheet, which I recently found. I sent letters to a dozen or two of the agents. A couple were interested, but I eliminated one who seemed like he might be running a scam. I sent the manuscript to the other one, Daniel Bial4, but he sent it back with a note that he was no longer interested.
I rewrote the whole book with a new approach. I increased the number of chapters to twenty-four and added a lovable fictitious nun named Sr. Mary Immaculata. She provided the Church’s position on puzzling events. The new version emphasized the trickiness of the various pontiffs. It was now called Stupid Pope Tricks: What Sr. Mary Immaculata never revealed about the papacy. I also added a lot of humorous touches such as a list of “bankable bar bets” about strange aspects of papal history.
I sent the new manuscript to Mr. Bial, but he would not read it. I did not blame him. Who was I to be writing about the history of the papacy? I had no credentials either as a writer or as a historian. I also had no “platform”, which is what publishers call the natural audience that politicians, celebrities, and a few others have for their memoirs.
I therefore decided to post it on Wavada.org using a slightly modified version of the code that I had written for my travel journals, as explained here. This would me allow me to add a lot of images and make it more entertaining. I did not promote it, but a few people stumbled onto the site and told me that they liked it. That was somewhat comforting. I don’t know what more that I could have done.
In my opinion the most fascinating pope was Benedict IX of the eleventh century. I could not find a single author that wrote anything good about him, but the source of most of the calumnies against him was a monk named Peter Damian. Yes, he was canonized as a saint, but he was also a cloistered monk who never visited Rome during Benedict’s pontificates. All of his information must have been second- or third-hand. Perry Mason could easily have gotten all the charges dismissed.
The word “pontificates” in the above paragraph was not a misprint. Benedict IX’s name is on the official list of popes three times. His first pontificate ended when a rival family staged a coup, drove him out of Rome, and elected a new pope named Sylvester III. That pontificate lasted 48 days before Benedict regrouped his supporters and reclaimed the throne. A short time later Benedict, who was still a young man, fell in love and resigned in order to get hitched. A new pope (Gregory VI) was elected, but shortly thereafter the new Holy Roman Emperor came to Italy, decided that he was not worthy, and forced the bishops to elect his choice to replace Pope Gregory. When the emperor departed from Italy, Benedict assumed the throne again. No one seemed to know what happened to his wedding plans.
In all, Benedict was the recognized pope for about thirteen years, the longest pontificate in the eleventh century. It was about the same length as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.
I had a very hard time thinking of any set of scenarios that made sense of the middle of the eleventh century—before Gregory VII, the Great Schism, and the First Crusade. I came up with a few reasonable (to me) assumptions that seemed to explain the whole period. I then wrote a fictional translation of an imaginary autobiography of Benedict IX defending his reputation replete with scholarly footnotes.The result was Ben 9: An Autobiographical Apologia by Theophylact of Tusculum,Thrice Supreme Pontiff of the Christian Church Translated by Edgar Filbert Thomasson. Most of the characters were actual people. The behavior of the most outrageous character in the story, Gerhard Brazutus, was based on accusations leveled by at least one cardinal. I used Occam’s razor to concoct the simplest explanation that I could think of that explained what the cardinal claimed.
My experience with the first book chastened me from attempting to get this one published. As far as I know the only person who has read any version of it is my friend Tom Corcoran.
So, this novel was also posted on the Wavada.org website, along with the text of the story that Northeast Magazine published that has been described here.
Epilogue: I never lost my fascination with the popes. I have not done a lot of research on Benedict XVI and Francis, mostly because they seemed so much more boring than John Paul II. Benedict at least had snazzy shoes and wrote a three-volume history of Jesus Christ. Both Benedict and John Paul did a rather nifty job of tap dancing around the bishops’ approach to the problem of clerical molestation.
My obsession with the popes has continued for two decades. Every so often I have come across an article or book that makes reference to “the pope”. I always make the effort to chase down which pope was involved and what was the context. Almost always the person making the comment misunderstood or misstated the actual event. The last such event occurred in Würzburg on the cruise that I took in 2022. It has been documented here. In this case it was actions by two different popes that were conflated into one story.
Additional blog entries about the popes can be found here.
1. Everything concerning the popes—even the numbering—is complicated. There has only been one Pope Formosus (the name means “shapely” or “physically fit”), and so he will never have a number unless some future pope picks that name. The perpetrator of the Cadaver Synod was known as Stephen VII at the time, but later a previous pope named Stephen, who had been Supreme Pontiff for only three days, was removed from the list. All subsequent Stephens had their number reduced by one. So, the prosecutor/judge of the trial has been known as Stephen VI since that time. There are also quite a few numbers that have been skipped. For example, there is no John XX or Benedict X on the list. Furthermore, in the twentieth century two popes, Cletus and Donus II were removed, because historians determined that they never existed. So, Pope Donus I lost his number.
2. A description of the amazing partnership between Google (now known as Alphabet) and U-M can be read here.
3. The canonized pontiffs are Celestine V, a hermit who never entered Rome and was essentially imprisoned in Castel Nuovo during the entirety of his short pontificate, Pius V, who was most famous for excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I of England and thereby causing persecution of English Catholics, and Pius X, who opposed modernism and saxophone music in the early twentieth century. As of 2023 Pope Francis had canonized three recent popes.
4. Mr. Bial’s agency still existed in 2023. The website is here.
