Mima, Max & Fitsimons

Mima

Cinzia and I have a fairly regular “all-night” poker session with a couple of the Outlaws (the brother and sister-in-law of Cinzia’s ex-husband) and another guest participant is Mima.

Mima is the widow of a tycoon who left their two sons a thriving sands and metal business and left his widow a vault full of money. Mima likes to fill her life with the thrill of gambling at the Adelaide Casino and she is used to going “all-in” as a standard card game practice and she applies the same approach to our poker games around the kitchen table.

Mima ALWAYS bets on her hand, irrespective of whether she has good cards or not and she bets heavily which makes her an exciting card player whether the outcome is good or bad. That is to say that her aggressive strategies ensure that the night finishes with Mima’s heavy losses OR a boot full of our money.

Now we naturally assume that the same thing happens when she spends her nights at the casino. The only tangible indication of this is that she has come home from a night on the Texas Holdem tables not once but TWICE driving the latest two-door, convertible, absolutely top-of-the-range Mercedes Benz (the latest of which is what she uses to take home her winnings from the kitchen-table tournaments). Cinz and I play with the ultimate goal of coming to a position in the pre-dawn contests where Mima’s night has NOT gone well and she has emptied her handbag and in a desperate attempt to come out closer to square, has thrown the keys to one of the Mercs on the table as betting collateral. So far we haven’t quite gotten to that point but we have not given up all hope of being successful at some future stage. Mind you, if we DO get there, we are praying that one of us is sitting on a pretty good hand!

Max and pool

Max, an ex-primary school teacher, is one of our immediate neighbours – he resides in one of the three apartments above us. We all get on very well (the occupants of the six apartments in our building). Max looks a bit worse for wear but he has a few redeeming features. He was divorced at the age of seventy and decided that he needed to do something about a change of lifestyle – apart from the obvious fact that he had to sell the “former matrimonial home” and find a new abode, had to quickly acquire the ability to fend for himself and to find something that would “fill his days”. He moved into the apartment in our retirement village and, at the ripe old age of seventy, elected to take up learning to play the piano from scratch! Now, that takes rare courage and commitment, I reckon.

He delights in drinking red vino and in talking about a huge range of topics but doesn’t dribble shit – his topics of conversation are always intelligent, informed and interesting, and the more red vino he consumes, the more fluent and interesting are the subjects of discussion.

Now each Friday from 4:30pm about sixty of the village residents meet for drinks in the Clubhouse. It’s two-thirds girls and the balance boys – which pretty accurately reflects the general village demographic. The girls all sit at a long table talking about their husbands’ ailments before death or their existing ailments if they are survivors and the boys (sitting nearby on the “boys’ long table) talk about global economics, the state of the nation, current village events or football.

Now some of the boys squeeze in a game of pool on the pool table adjacent and, by chance, Max and I became partners against two other roosters who, it soon became obvious, were players who took the game a tad more seriously than their opponents. It subsequently became apparent how seriously when it was revealed that they each possessed their OWN cue, complete with carrying case! It only took a few rounds for Max and I to conclude that we had better come up with our very best form to avoid shame and even disgrace in front of the other patrons.

Now, the both of us, having been “more-or-less”, intellectuals and having spent some time in our youth in billiard halls whilst pursuing a tertiary education, were not rank novices at the game. Nobody was aware, either, that I had once in a former matrimonial home, owned a half-size billiard table of my own in my own games room. So, once Max and I got ourselves suitably psyched up, we gave them a real run for their money. We had two games, winning one game and losing the second on the black ball. When the two “pros” dismantled their split cues and set them nicely into their unholstered carrying cases and Max and I returned our one-piece cues to the cue rack at the scoreboard we walked away reasonably content and the other two obviously went back to their respective villas haunted by the knowledge that these two very recent “fly-ins” might turn out to be possible challengers to their hitherto status as the kings of the pool table.

I was fairly happy with my performance considering a thirty-year break from the game but I thought that, presuming that there will be further challenges ahead, I should sneak in a bit of practice, mainly so that I would “hold up my end” and provide continuing high-level support for partner Max. So, while Cinzia sneaks down when the Clubhouse is unoccupied to practise her scales and her music-making on the Clubhouse piano I accompany her and practise my skills on the pool table.

I play matches against myself. That is I am the player on BOTH teams. The good thing is that I am almost invariably the winner, notwithstanding the fact that I am also the loser. I say “almost always” because in one of my recent practice sessions I was actually playing so badly that it became most embarrassing (although no-one else was watching) that, in disgust, BOTH teams forfeited! The situation was doubly embarrassing because “we” were playing doubles at the time – meaning that there were FOUR players, all of whom were actually me. So absolutely BAD was the standard of the game that all four players played equally atrociously! Not one of us could pot a ball! Absolutely unbelievable! When you are playing THAT badly there is no point in continuing – there is absolutely no hope of even one of the players finding some spontaneous improvement. It is best just to abandon the game, rack up the cues and balls, put the cover back on the table and piss off and return another day when, hopefully, form improves, at the very least for one or more of the players!

Fitzsimons

I have been into some heavy reading of late and my genre of choice is non-fiction, mostly biographical. I have been absorbed in the reading of some of the twenty or more books written by ex-Wallaby, Peter Fitzsimons. A much simpler time (an autobiography), Gallipoli, The tail of Les Darcy and Charles Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men are the ones I have read so far and I found them gripping and enthralling, due mostly to Fitzy’s writing style. His stuff is all factual and historical but told in a very, very easy-to-read, down-to-Earth, colloquial style. His research team produces an incredible array of detail and Fitzy converts that detail into an eminently digestible, enjoyable reading experience. I was wondering if I had sufficient time left to get all the way through 680 pages and was absolutely amazed that five weeks later I had read not one but TWO!

If you haven’t already come across any of his books it is well worth a stroll to the local library to have a go. My next mission is Ned Kelly which I have ordered on a library exchange.

What I have found absolutely incredible is that Fitzsimons writes in such an engaging manner for a journalist! I have read lots of biographies and other non-fictional material written, or ghost written, by other journalists who tell the story but not with such flair. All you get from them is factual information (which is very informative) but lacks vitality – fills you with knowledge but not with inspiration, insight and sheer reading enjoyment.

Health report

I have spent the past seven months commuting from the hospital to the toilet. I have a ticklish right kidney for two years and when I took it to the urologist he claimed that he was slightly stumped in advising the cause of my discomfort however the CT scan revealed a 12mm stone in the right kidney. Now a stone embedded in the kidney usually does not cause too much trouble. The excruciating pain usually arises when the stone hits the ureter in its efforts to make a break for freedom via the bladder and the doodle.

Looking more closely at the CT scan he observed that my appendix was twice the size than expected and he said: “Mate, if that was my appendix I would have it removed”. He sent me to an appendix expert who repeated his advice. He said: “Mate, we can’t tell if the appendix is good or bad until we take it out and have it examined under a microscope” so I took their advice and had the appendix removed. Subsequently they reported that it contained a large but benign tumour. They thought they got everything out but then gave me a coloscopy to make certain that no bad stuff migrated to the colon. I have had that procedure and I get the result of the biopsy this Thursday.

Now the urologist also arranged to laser blast the 12mm stone by sending a laser zapper up my doodle, ureter and into the kidney. The ureter is a maximum 10mm so it would prove impossible for me to pass the stone, which if left in the kidney would undoubtedly result in kidney infection which, in my 95 year-old mother’s case, proved fatal.

So they inserted a rubber stent up the doodle, ureter and into the kidney in order to make it possible to send up the heavy artillery to blast the stone. That was performed in two separate procedures, each of which were performed in day surgery under general anaesthetic. When I went to have the stent removed last week they found that they had almost but not entirely zapped the stone – there was still 4mm of it in the kidney so they have to go up there again to blast it so yet another procedure and another general anaesthetic! I don’t react very well to the anaesthetic. I usually vomit all night following surgery. The (hopefully) final procedure is to be performed this coming Monday. That’s good because for the past four months (while I have had the stent) I have had to stay in the toilet because I had to expel my wee continually as my normal bladder control was usurped by the stent!

The good news is that, following all these procedures, the kidney is no longer giving me grief! Something worked. Not sure what. All the vomiting has been worth it.

Bryan

10 October 2023