Dominoes

I am a lucky man. Besides being blessed by a loving husband, I have some very generous friends. One of my friends, Ginny, used to play poker with me in a friendly neighborhood poker group. As my MS progressed, holding the cards in my hands became more difficult. Shuffling them and dealing them became comical. Our poker host found a battery-operated shuffling machine, a great innovation, that lengthened my poker career another year or so. Finally I had to bid them au revoir because I just wore out too quickly.

But Ginny was determined to find a game that I could manage. So we settled on dominoes. (My voice recognition software sometimes prints a word that sounds a little like the one I actually said, but implies something very different. I laughed out loud just a second ago because when I said ‘dominoes’ my system printed ‘dominance’. That's a whole different game, for a different conversation.)

Now, Ginny and I play dominoes about twice a month. We go out to lunch first and then come back to my place. If I get tired of sitting up, we take a 10-minute break and I stretch my chair out so I can fully relax. I win about as many games as I lose and that's very good for my spirits. We play at a leisurely pace, giving ourselves time to gossip and laugh a lot.

Ginny is a busy self-employed professional who spends three or four hours with me just because. When I’m with her I feel like my old self, you know, funny and catty and significant. Hers is a thoughtful gift of time and attention. I don’t think I ever did things in my life to deserve such a friend. I am a lucky man.