Wild Cards

With the exception of my maternal grandfather, who was a baseball star at Vanderbilt and a member of Augusta National, I do not come from a sporty family. My father was known to bet on football (our bookie was the oyster shucker at Doe’s Eat Place), but his were the solitary athletic pursuits of swimming and running with only one goal in mind: to live a very long time. My mother played tennis until her knees could no longer stand it, and I rode horses well into my adolescence. But my best friend and I were always the last to be picked for teams in gym class; our seventh-grade cheerleading tryout was more protest than serious.

The one thing we could all do was play cards. My paternal grandparents had a card room in their house devoted to my grandmother Kay’s energetic afternoon bridge games and the solitaire my grandfather Lyman played into the wee hours. (One of my chief running buddies lived a few