The adventure could hardly have started better. The drive on Monday evening was easy and uneventful. When I walked through the Crowne Plaza’s rotating door my ears were treated to an orchestral version of “Vissi d’arte,” the show-stopping aria from Puccini’s Tosca. It seemed like such a good omen that my mood rose several octaves. Perhaps I should have remembered that the opera concludes with the distraught heroine taking a header from one of the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo.

I checked in. Before consuming the light repast that I had brought with me I perambulated over to the huge meadow that separates the hotel from Route 113. At the time it was populated by fifty-nine Canada Geese uniformly marching slowly south as they devoured the greensward. They let me pass through them so that I could take a few shots of them with the hotel in the background. On my return trip I realized that that the gaggle helped the groundskeeper not only by serving as unpaid lawnmowers but also as fertilizers.

On Tuesday I played with Ginny Iannini in the A/B Swiss. Our teammates were Sol Hartman and Ginny O’Toole. We seemed to play pretty well and, in fact ended up tied for second in B, despite the fact that we seemed to play an inordinately large number of A teams. The four of us – and Ginny’s husband Brian – celebrated by driving into Providence to dine at Al Forno. We had a great time savoring the delicious food and listening to Sol’s tales of how he had been declared 4F while matriculating at Columbia and his run-ins with various members of “connected” families while growing up in Providence. The former story afforded me the opportunity to relate a few episodes from my own illustrious and decorated military career defending the nation from the Red Menace in Albuquerque and upstate New York.

We had fresh teammates, Charlie Curley and Gene Flynn, for the 0-4000 knockout that began on Wednesday morning. Our foursome got off to a good start; in fact, we were ahead by eight imps at the halfway mark of our morning head-to-head match. However, in the second half our opponents switched sides, and the new match-ups did not go as well. At the time I thought that the turning point was a hand in which I doubled a 3♠ preempt, and Ginny had left it in. This cost us 930 points when the declarer harvested ten tricks. However, as hard as it was for all eight players to believe, the exact same result was achieved at the other table. The real problem arose on the next two hands, which produced 25 tricks for our side but no slams. At the other table they bid and made a granny on one of the hands, and that sealed our doom. Our opponents, who hailed from Florida, went on to win the event on Thursday.

The less said about the Red Point Swiss the better. I punished myself for our poor play by walking to the Taco Bell for supper. I meant to watch the college football game on TV after returning to my room, but I could not stomach it.

My last day playing with Ginny, Thursday, began with a very bad draw in the first round of the Open Swiss. On my left was Lew Gamerman, and on my right was Jeremy the bookseller, who was filling in for Bob McCaw, who had been caught in traffic. Jeremy in fact played the first three hands, making all three contracts with a little help from the opposition. Bob arrived just in time to witness me playing three consecutive doubled contracts, which prompted me to inquire whether the Partnership Desk was still accepting applicants. Needless to say, I went down thrice.

Bloodied but unbowed, our team prevailed in our next three matches before being blitzed again by a very strong A team. We still could have finished among the leaders in B, but the breaks did not go our way in the last two matches.

Ginny and I were joined at supper by Bob Bertoni, Richie Healy, and Sarah Widhu’s team from New Hampshire, a foursome that had positively cleaned up – with only a little help from us – over the first few days of the tournament. We drove to a restaurant named Siena in East Greenwich. For me the highlight of the journey down Route 1 was the chance to see again the establishment of one of my company’s earliest clients, Thorpe’s Liquor Store. It was more than thirty years ago; I don’t even remember what kind of system we designed and installed for them.

The food at Siena was outstanding, and the camaraderie was likewise heartening. For me the most astounding news of the evening was the revelation that Ginny was my senior by one year. As I gazed upon my own beleaguered visage in the mirror the next morning I could only imagine that in some dilapidated garret somewhere on the Cape a painting of her rested on an easel and turned year by year into the image of a desiccated, gap-toothed, stoop-shouldered hag.

Ginny’s last words to me included an announcement that she would be unable to attend the B’s Needs Committee Meeting on Saturday. She was naïve enough to bestow her proxy on me.

My wife, Sue, arrived on Thursday. She played in the afternoon and evening sessions in the 299ers. Ergo, she was unable to join us at Siena. She had spent the first half of the week running around trying to replace the contents of a wallet that she had misplaced over the weekend. So, she was more than a little frazzled.

On Friday I was joined by one of my Hartford partners, Michael Dworetsky. We expected to play in the Compact Knockout in the Plaza Ballroom. Because of the unexpected popularity of this event we were, however, relegated to the Rotunda Room, the home of the 299ers. We won both halves of our first match in rather easy fashion, but we lost both very close half-matches in the second half. I had poor cards for all twelve hands, and I felt frustrated that there was not much that I could do to advance our cause. So, we again found ourselves relegated to the Red Point Swiss, and once again we did nothing of note there.

Michael and I drove to the nearby Long Horn Steakhouse. We had hoped to dine there with Ausra Geaski and Tucker Merritt, long-time friends from the Hartford Bridge Club, but there was a line, and Ausra and Tucker needed to find something quicker so that they could participate in the evening session.

As the B’s Needs meeting on Saturday morning. I informed everyone that Ginny would be unable to attend and that she had assigned her proxy to me. I then moved that she be expelled from the committee and seconded the motion with my other vote. I proceeded to cast one vote in favor and one against. Everyone else abstained. Later I volunteered Ginny for every subcommittee that Ausra deemed appropriate.

I mentioned that although I now had over 4,800 good e-mail addresses in my database, I was still missing well over 3,000. Carolyn Weiser asked me to send her the list of the missing from EMBA, and Lois DeBlois did the same for Rhode Island. I really appreciate their help.

We fielded a strong team for the Compact Knockout on Saturday. We made it through the first match, but we lost by too large a margin to Bob Bertoni’s team in one half of the second match. Although we won our other half match, it was not enough. So, it was the Red Point Swiss for us again.

The first three rounds were mostly successful and relatively uneventful. The highlight for me was when Horace Gower came to our table to announce that the ACBL had sent a telegram with the news that the Single-Session Swiss would henceforth be known in all sanctioned tournaments as the Wavada Swiss in recognition of all of my contributions over the years to this august event. And then,

Train Wreck in Warwick

Kills 21 Imps

I am offering the standard cash award of $.05 to the reader who provides the closest description of the hands held by me and my partner on this calamitous hand. Here is the auction, in which both sides were vulnerable.

The result was down four for -1100. The carnage was even worse at the other table. Our counterparts landed in a hopeless 6♥ contract. However, one of our teammates ducked when she should have leapt, and the declarer was able to swindle the trick he needed to make the bid. So, our teammates were embarrassed to report a score of -1430. I therefore had the dubious distinction of recording a personal record by writing a 21 in the minus section of the Imps column. I wonder if I will ever get to write such a figure in the plus section.

While this tragedy was going on, Sue and her partner, Judy Cavagnaro, were in the process of finishing off a 65.77% game. This was the first event that either of them had won, and they bested 19 other pairs to achieve it! I knew that Sue had been running on fumes, and so I asked her how she managed it. She confided that she let Judy play most of the hands in “spades, hearts, clubs, and that other suit.” I took the champions out to supper at Carrabas, and we all had a splendid time.

Unfortunately, I slept poorly afterwards. I kept visualizing the mangled bodies of those innocent imps that were being pried from the twisted wreckage of the misbegotten Acela Express. The horrific event played over and over in my mind. Could I not have done something to avert the tragedy?

Sunday began with the Board Delegates meeting. Mark was awarded one of my Wave cards when he mispronounced my last name. The news about attendance was as bad as expected. The Warwick tournament was better than the previous fiascoes, but the table count was still down. I have some ideas, but they are not ready for prime time. In the meantime I will try to drum up interest in what’s left of the schedule using e-mail.

We got off to a great start in the Round Robin, but I suspected that my own performance would deteriorate in the afternoon, and I was right. Several gallons of coffee failed to keep me alert. The most ignominious moment was when I opted not to bid a lay-down grand slam for the simple reason that I was mentally incapable of placing the key cards, all of which we held. Our teammates also made some mistakes, and we closed out the tournament with a plaintive whimper.

The drive home was unexpectedly exciting. We made it through Worcester before the tornado arrived, but several times it rained so fiercely that for the first time ever I had to use the super-fast setting for the windshield wipers on my 2007 Honda couple. The water on I-91 in Springfield was so high at one point that it nearly pushed my vehicle into the lane to my right. I gripped the wheel so tightly that both hands cramped up. Dave Dudley inspired me to press on. “Six days on the road, and I’m gonna make it home tonight.”

I accomplished very little in twelve sessions at the bridge table, but I still had a great time. Is that perverse? Have I lost my edge? I am not sure that I care that much, but I would certainly like to discover the formula for getting a reasonable amount of sleep at a tournament.