Bridge in a trumped-up world

Danielle and I like playing bridge.

Apart from the enjoyment of the game, I just like its name. We live in a world that needs bridges. Sadly, we seem instead to be building walls, the most dismal being the one along the US-Mexico border, whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t exist and probably never will.

But as well as the name, I like the way bridge classifies the four suits of the deck of cards it uses.

Two suits are referred to as ‘majors’. They’re hearts and spades. That seems to celebrate two of the more positive aspects of human existence, affection and hard work (please don’t write to tell me that this isn’t the derivation of ‘spades’ – I know and it’s of no importance – the word is spades and spades are for digging, and that’s all that matters to me).

On the other hand, the minors, inferior to the other two, are diamonds and clubs. A certain type of precious stone may or may not be a girl’s best friend but is certainly, and above all, an ostentatious display of wealth. Similarly, a club may well provide an opportunity for entertainment (perhaps even by playing bridge), but also and very often acts to separate out a self-appointed elite from the excluded masses.

Love and work preferred over wealth and elitism? My kind of values.

Greater, of course, than any of the suits is the fifth bridge option, known as No Trumps. It’s hard to imagine what could be more appropriate, given what looks like the probable outcome of the US election in November.

No Trump: something to pray for. Whether or not you’re a bridge player.

Max: highs and lows and a big step forward

Max in our woods

The 21st of June 2004. The day of the year when we got most light. But a day of highs and lows, for us, but above all for Max. 

The low for him is that he spent most of it under the care of a vet, who anaesthetised him and cut out a growth from his lip. That was one of the two events of the day that Max certainly knew about, at least until the anaesthetic knocked him out. What he didn’t know about, but might have given him a compensating high, was that a representative of the dog shelter where we met him was at the vet’s too. She had the papers we needed to sign to move Max from his existing status, in foster care with us, to full adoption. 

We signed. The deed was done. Max had adopted us.

As it happens, if he’d been aware of it, I’m not sure whether he would have regarded it as anything like as momentous as we did.

‘So what’s changed exactly?’ he might have asked.

After all, he knew, and had known for a while, that he lived with us. That we and the house we amusingly persist in regarding as ours, now formed his household. He didn’t need anyone’s signature on a dotted line to confirm what to him must have seemed obvious.

Humans, though, are more complicated. We need bits of paper. We need other people to confirm things that anybody sensible, like a previously abandoned dog only too relieved to have a house to live in at last, views as a done deal.

To be fair, there had been a few issues that we at least, if not Max, needed to clear up during the fostering period.

He had been known to growl at our grandkids. Now, I’m not beyond growling at them myself, especially at 3:00 in the morning, but it’s unlikely that I would ever bite them. Was the same true of Max? We couldn’t really share a house with a dog that might harm the children.

Well, I’m glad to say that during their most recent visits, relations between the grandkids and Max have improved immeasurably. In fact, while our grandson Elliott was with us the week before last, he became quite a fan of feeding Max treats. Max returned the favour, naturally becoming rather a fan of Elliott in his role as treat purveyor. As I recorded previously, Max had probably had little or no contact with kids earlier and that made him wary of them. He seemed to have overcome such fears now, and to have adapted, at least to those two.

In one area there’d been a slightly worrying development, but one we think we can deal with. As he has become increasingly integrated into the household, he has learned from the girls – Luci and Toffee, the two toy poodles – that it’s the dogs’ duty to guard the house. There are people who have the gall to go walking casually past the end of our back or front garden, sometimes even taking their impudence to the point of having dogs – other dogs, not properly cleared or authorised to approach the premises – with them. The answer is naturally to run down to one or other gate and bark at them and, as I mentioned last time, Max has become good at that.

Unfortunately, he’s gone still further. He tends to be less well-disposed towards men than women, possibly because the person who abandoned him was likely to be a hunter (the podenco breed is the classic Spanish hunting dog) and probably a man. When a workman visited us some time ago, and Max couldn’t stop him coming in by barking at him, he bit him instead. Nothing too damaging, and the victim took it in good part, though he admitted it had hurt. We’re taking more care now to keep Max away from anyone he might not take to well, since it’s not something we want to see happen again.

Overall, though, we felt there was no insuperable obstacle to the adoption and so Danielle signed.

The worst moment for Max at the vet’s must have been when Danielle left him there. The poor chap knows what abandonment feels like. Why, the shelter had picked him up from a roadside, where he’d maintained his existence for an uncertain time by foraging for whatever food he could find. He’d learned the difference between surviving and living. Danielle stayed with him until the anaesthetic knocked him out, but waking up, surrounded by strangers in a strange place, must have been a dismal experience that woke some less than pleasant memories. 

I’m not sure he altogether forgave us at first. It may have been just the after-effects of the anaesthetic, but it seemed to me that when we got him home, there was something of an unspoken reproach about him. Something which, had he expressed it in words, might have taken the form, ‘you left me behind. Don’t you know how painful that is for someone who’s already known abandonment? Besides, I woke up with this bloody pain in my lip. What on earth did you have those guys do to me while I was out and unable to defend myself?’

Yep. Couches are a good thing. And this one’s mine

Still, it didn’t last. Quite quickly he settled back into his life. Another change during the fostering period was that, where before he seemed reluctant to clamber onto a couch, perhaps because he’d never lived indoors and didn’t know what they were for, these days he’s fine with them. Indeed, he’s taken over one of our couches, to the point where for a while he insisted on its exclusive use and simply wouldn’t get up on it if anyone else was there. These days, he might even consent to letting one of the family, or one of Luci and Toffee, up onto it with him, but still won’t share it with other visitors.

OK, OK, Luci can come too. So long as she behaves

Anyway, it was good to see him on his couch and relaxing once more, the mood of hurt and disappointment apparently dissipating.

And then, of course, there was the evening walk. Max is a dog who springs to his feet and rushes over if he hears us so much as approaching the door. Getting out into the woods was a return to delight for him. I should say, in passing, that he’s great on walks and our fears that he might suddenly reveal the common podenco custom of disappearing and failing to return for hours, haven’t been realised. 

The walk went well. Max enjoyed himself. He even revealed his imperturbability by simply ignoring a magpie that attacked him.

Max ignoring an aerial attack

Why did the bird attack? Well, the magpies have their fledgelings at the moment and, like their close cousins the crows, the magpies have young that leave (or possibly fall from) the nest before they can fly. For two or three days they need to be protected from potential predators, a category to which they have clearly decided that Max belongs.

So it was fun to see him being not just admonished – with loud cawing – but actually buzzed by a flying magpie while we were out. And equally fun to see how he completely ignored it. He had things to smell, bushes to explore, and he wasn’t going to be disturbed by a tiresome bird.

Back to normal, then. And now as a full member of the household. Something for him to take for granted and for us to celebrate.

Which we did with a glass or two that evening.

Now I’ve adopted you,
the least you can do is stroke me when I ask

Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.