Quest of a Closet Poker Player

How do you stop playing poker cold turkey?  Chaperone 150 5th graders at a camp in the middle of Alabama.

I’m not quite sure how I signed up to be a chaperon for this, but there I was at The Big Guy’s school Monday morning, looking over my roster of thirteen boys that I would be overseeing for three days.  I asked if they had a wireless network when it was time for questions, and the director looked at me like I was from Mars.  This trip was the highlight of the Elementary School experience for kids, sort of a rite of passage for eleven and twelve year olds before heading off to the dangerous world of Middle School.  It was a YMCA camp, and indeed it was a bit rustic for me and my fellow Suburbanites.

Sweetie convinced me to bring my poker chips, but there was no time to transform my horde into a pack of ravenous LAG’s.   I drove a couple of other dads, and the kids came on three big travel buses.  We hurled all of their luggage onto the ground, sidewalks covered with three inches of pollen.  I had snuck into the Apache cabin prior to the kids getting there, grabbing a prime bottom bunk away from both the bathroom and the door.  The smell?  Think high school locker room after two-a-days or summer basketball camp or some other filthy stench of male ick.

I had two groups:  my cabin and my trail group.  The trail group included eight boys and ten girls, about a third of them Asian American.  I’d always been thankful for the diversity of ethnicity of the school, and it was very clear with all the kids in the open air gym just how diverse it was.  We had decent to bad food which the kids thought was terrific, we had a camp store which consisted of candy bars and fountain soft drinks to crank them up for a few hours (very high profit margins, by the way).  And we hiked up and down big slopes and hills for fairly brief spurts, testing my knee and heart.

This was a fairly abnormal group, with no fights over three days, with nerds and loners and cool kids and jocks still mixing fairly well.  The last year of innocence maybe, I’m not sure.  At the campfire, I was drafted to be in the chaperon skit where we were given a sort of Who’s Line Is It Anyway scenario of roles in television commercial with the same lines but different themes.  I had the punch line and final line of the skit, and of course I was the star of the show.  All the eleven year old girls chatted me up, the guys thought I was cool with my shizzle to the principal-izzle reference when we had the hip-hop theme.  The Big Guy was briefly a few points more popular, although his coolness is unfortunately fleeting.

Our last night had an early start for me as one of our kids threw up all over the place around 3:30 the morning we were leaving.  He continued to do so most of the morning, and I took him out of the cabin after he’d gotten sick all over his bedding.  He’d shown me his scar the night before, the inverted T starting at the top of the sternum and ending I’m assuming a bit below the xyphoid process (Rav, you’ll need to confirm this), then the bottom line stretching from one side of the gut to another.  He explained that the liver transplant incision is significantly larger than a kidney transplant, and three years later he still fought rejection and degradation of his condition.

No laptop, no email, minimal cell phone coverage.  It was a bit refreshing, in all honesty.  I was glad I was in a situation that I could go, and yet I also ached to have my days filled with career challenges.  I missed chatting with my poker buddies and playing, but actually it was a fairly easy transition for me to take a break.  I think it told me I need to play more in less frequent period, but I’m not sure.  We’ll see.

No CC’s Thursday Bash tonight as Sweetie and All-In have been sick since 4:30 this morning (welcome home…).  I have the Little Guy here in my home office, taking my fourteen poker chips of various type that I have on my desk and dropping them on the floor and into the trash can.

I also chatted briefly with Linda this morning, and it looks like I’m headed back to the WSOP for PokerWorks.  That’s very exciting, and I have to work on a good plan of attack for her over the next couple days.  I need to head, but thanks for the break and coming back to say hello.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 11:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized.