Sometimes you need to go back to the beginning to make sense out of the present.
This seems to be true no matter what the subject is -- poker, horse racing, or life.
Take poker, for example. In the 1970s and 80s, I was so determined to win that nobody was able to beat me. When I found myself losing, I just got tougher. I would psych myself up by going into the men's room of a casino and staring into the mirror, repeating out loud, “You wouldn't dare raise me with a full house. I'd crush you!” I would say it over and over, even if a porter would walk into the rest room to clean it. I'm sure some of them thought I was crazy.
One black porter even grinned at me when I told him what I was doing and why I was doing it.
“Man, I thought you was going through the conniptions,” he said, shaking his head. I never found out what the conniptions were.
The same is true of horse racing. In the 1970s I developed a system of betting twice as much to pace and three times as much to show on a horse. My bet would be something like $5-10-15 across the board. It paid off for me. I would almost always win more than I lost and even the bookies admired my system.
My brother Legs just informed me that one of my high school classmates, Peggy Miller, had just died a couple of weeks after suffering a stroke.
Peggy was a vivacious, attractive blond whose parents owned a lumber company in my home town of Sutersville, PA. She did everything right at Sewickley Township High School. She made good grades, was head cheerleader, had a smile for everybody.
She dated Richard Nesbitt, one of the nicest kids in the school. Like Peggy, Richard was blond, good natured, and upbeat about life. He and Peggy married, they took over the lumber company business, and from what I know about them, they lived happily ever after just like in the fairy tales I enjoyed as a child.
Life changes and it can be brutal. The Sutersville Lumber Co. ran into problems and after a rough period closed its doors, laying off its employees. Some of them had never had another job. They lost their 401ks and things were never again the same.
A few years ago, I drove back to Pennsylvania for a family reunion. I decided to visit Herminie where my high school was located. The school is about six miles from my home and you need to follow a lovely winding road through the country that passes farms and insulbrick homes scattered in the hollows and forests.
Sewickley Township High was a school built for the working class. We had a good football team, a decent baseball team, and I went out for both. I didn't quite make football but I became a pitcher on the baseball team, playing for a crusty coach named John Bruno.
When I became a senior, my guidance counselor, a woman, listened to my plans for the future. When I told her, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and writer, she scoffed and told me to stop dreaming. She encouraged me to get a job at the Irwin Works, a steel manufacturing plant where my father was employed and where my brothers would spend their lives working.
“The steel mill will take care of you,” she said. “You'll never go hungry.”
Bless her heart, she was trying to give me good advice. But she was wrong. I became a journalist and a magazine writer and I never, ever regretted my decision.
One thing I can assure you of. Things change. Life changes. And sometimes people need to go back to the beginning to figure out what the present is all about.
*conniption /kəˈnɪpʃ(ə)n/ noun, a fit of rage or hysterics
