My Unlikely Addiction

Everyone knows that shuffleboard is for old people, right? You have to live in a retirement home to even begin to enjoy this silly and simple “sport” that involves pushing a disc, right?
WRONG! Either that, or I am old before my time, because I, age 53, am seriously addicted to this game.

It all started with moving to Florida, land of many retirees. We moved here to purchase and run a business, and early on we found ourselves with some amount of “spare time” that could be filled with recreation. Right up the street from us, at 109 E. Main Street (across the street from City Hall at 110 E. Main), was a facility that fascinated Stu, despite its sign reading “Avon Park Senior Activities Center,” because of its many visible shuffleboard courts. Upon inquiry, Stu discovered that the club is open to any adult of age 18 or older, although there aren’t currently many members under age 60.

Stu and I had some familiarity with shuffleboard in its court format, having once been members of the Jewish Community Centers Association, or J.C.C.A., back in St. Louis. The JCCA, or “the J” for short, is an organization similar to the YMCA (which started originally as the “Young Men’s Christian Association). They had these cryptic courts with the numbers on them that kind of looked like hopscotch. In fact, at least one year that Stu participated as a “youngster” (50+) in the St. Louis Senior Olympics at the “J”, he participated in the shuffleboard event there. He remembers that he didn’t do particularly well in that event and now he knows why-- it’s not as easy as it looks.

Shuffleboard courts are fairly rare in St. Louis, MO, at least to the degree that we were not aware of any shuffleboard CLUBS existing there during our residence. In Florida, however, shuffleboard is a VERY popular sport which many of its devotees take quite seriously. And there is good reason for this. As we grew to learn the sport, we found a great deal of mental strategy involved in being competitive at shuffleboard. Rather than a simple game where you try to shove discs into areas for score, shuffleboard turns out to be more like a cross between billiards and chess when you really start to learn the game.

Stu joined the Avon Park club in January of 2010, just one month after we moved to Avon Park, and quickly fell in love with the game. He convinced me to join shortly thereafter since it was amazingly inexpensive for a yearly membership that allowed unlimited play. He felt it would be something fun that we could do together, but he had no idea how addicted to it I would become.

The Avon Park club has what are called “scrambles” three times a week during winter season: 8:50 a.m. on Wednesdays (singles 16-frame), 8:50 a.m. on Saturdays (doubles 16-frame) and 1:00 p.m. on Sundays (doubles 12-frame, with ice cream and sometimes bingo thereafter). These are very informal sessions where you draw a disc from a bag indicating at which position you will play, either Head or Foot of a numbered court and a color, either Yellow or Black indicating the four discs you will use. You wind up playing against a variety of other people and in so doing, get to know them pretty well. We have met some of our closest friends in the area this way.

There are varying levels of expertise represented at the Avon Park shuffleboard club and at the Sebring Recreation Club, which are both part of Florida’s Central District. A Pro, or professional player, is someone who has placed 1st through 4th, or gotten a “point” as it’s also called, in 10 different district, state or national tournaments. Probably close to half of the players with whom we scramble several times a week are pros. There are levels of amateurs below pro, and our club even boasts at least one Hall of Fame pro, which I am told requires 100 points to achieve.

I played in my first all-amateur tournament this past Monday, partnering with Stu. Unfortunately for Stu, we not only did not place, but we lost four games in a row taking us completely out of the tournament quickly. On Thursday, Stu played in a Pro-Am mixed tournament, partnered with a pro named Esther, and they won their first four matches (8 games straight) to go into the finals. They not only placed, but won 2nd in that tournament. Stu is now up to two points of the 10 required to go pro.

I don’t see myself getting any points any time soon, but I certainly do love the game enough that it’s one of the main reasons I would be reluctant to move out of Florida. I know that some of the far northern states such as Ohio and Michigan (you know, the states whether the majority of snowbirds, or winter-only Florida residents, reside during the summer) have their own shuffleboard organizations, but if we were to move back to Missouri, I don’t believe there is a shuffleboard organization there.

While living in Florida, if I did get a regular office job, I could still shuffle on weekends, but as it is, I get to shuffle three to four times a week right up the street. Tomorrow I hope to participate in the all-day Monday mini-tournament. There is a small entry fee that goes into a pot to be divided among those who place. I don’t expect to place even in a mini at present, but if I keep practicing, someday I will do so; maybe even before I reach actual retirement age!

Better Living Through Chemistry

There are many people in this country that are not convinced that mental illness is a real, physical disability, which in many cases is very successfully treated by medication. I run into folks like this all the time. And frankly, I envy them their lack of hands-on experience in this area.

I am a survivor of what is often jokingly referred to as a dysfunctional family. My parents did the best they could do raising me, given the hand they were individually dealt in life. But my mother was seriously mentally ill, as were probably many of her ancestors before her, with what was then called Manic-Depressive Illness and is now known as Bipolar Disease. It affected her behavior in some pretty scary and unpredictable ways. I can honestly say that there were days I came home from school and put my key in the front door not knowing whether I was going to be offered some homemade hot chocolate or grabbed by the hair and screamed at about missing spots in whatever had been my assigned house cleaning chore the prior day.

There were at least as many good memories as bad ones for me, though; probably more good than bad, since apparently I tend to completely block out really bad events in my early life. But I digress.

Mom was a very tortured soul; in addition to her wild mood swings, she was addicted to cigarettes and to some degree to alcohol, the second being mostly in the form of self-medicating. From the 1950s, when my parents married, until the 1980s there were very few options for medications for mood leveling. My mother was under the care of three or four different psychiatrists during my early childhood before she found one that was really good.

There is apparently a very strong hereditary component to mental illness, as with so many other unfortunate traits (such as my late father’s poor distance vision and inability to play well with bifocal lenses). My only sister and I both suffer from some fairly severe mental illness and have since adolescence. In her case, she drew the shorter straw and got the full-blown bipolar nightmare. In my case, I lucked out with mere chronic depression – lows without euphoric highs.

I was able to be mostly functional despite my blackest depressions throughout my school years and into my working life. I rarely missed a day of work, although I’m sure some of my coworkers were less than enchanted with my tendency to complain about everything and turn my own life into the saddest story ever told. I was even able to get married and keep up some pretense of a successful romantic relationship for over 4 years in my late 20s and early 30s – but only my ex-husband knows the real truth. There’s a reason we didn’t stay married, and at least 50% of that was my moods. The other 50% was his moods; but that’s another whole story.

Sometime in my mid-30s, after my divorce in 1992 and the untimely death of my dear father in 1993, I was first introduced to an anti-depressant called Zoloft. This was not inexpensive, but my psychiatrist (who was also my mother’s excellent psychiatrist that did as well with her as anyone could) felt convinced that it would benefit me and help get my life back on track. Not that my life was all that far off track; I had a very successful career of over ten years working as a mainframe programmer and always got good reviews. Beneath the surface, however, was a lonely woman full of grief, self-doubt, and an endless supply of complaints to whoever would listen.

The Zoloft made a night and day difference in my behavior to those who were close enough to observe this difference. My mother and my best friend, who comprised my primary emotional support system at this time, were delighted in the change, as was I. Honestly, the medicine felt to me like being able to run and move freely in the fresh air and blue skies, after years of swimming through black water every day.

Variations on a mix of Zoloft and a later drug, Wellbutrin, were able to keep me well in the “normal” mood range for well over ten years, during which time I was able to handle the death of my mother in 1998 and actually meet a man shortly before that who was to become my second husband. I was also able to continue to excel in my career, even as I had doubts about whether I wanted to remain employed in the corporate world for life. Even after loss of my former livelihood and the move to Florida to buy a business that later turned out to be the worst investment of our lives, I remained optimistic.

However, after everything that has happened to us after buying this business, it’s not unexpected that the depression might return. I had known that in times of true life difficulty, sometimes these medications lose their effectiveness and require change or supplementation. With some urging from a great counselor here in town, who has helped me through a real crisis and been kind with the financial side as well, I made an appointment to see a psychiatrist in Lakeland, about 50 miles from here, in order to get on a new medication called Abilify. I knew it was a long drive, and I also knew that it was not going to be cheap – a serious consideration when one has no income at present like myself.

I have been on the new drug for about 10 days now, and I can already say that the visit to the psychiatrist was the best couple hundred bucks I have spent in a long time. So, Merry Christmas, everyone – I’m back among the emotional living this year.

The Almost Perfect Dog

After closing our bed and breakfast business, my husband and I decided that now would be the perfect time to adopt a second dog. We have been a two-dog family several times before, and always really enjoyed watching the dogs interact with each other. Now that we didn’t have people coming and going through our house, we decided it would be great to have a playmate for Jack, our greyhound/border collie/black lab mix, to run and play with him in our oversized fenced lot. We agreed it should be a young female who could bond with me the way Jack has bonded with Stu (he’s definitely a “daddy’s dog”).

Stu used the internet to review thousands of photos and descriptions, from many sources, of dogs available for adoption throughout Florida. He considered the necessary combination of size and weight (to run and play with Jack), gender (female), age (preferably housetrained but not much more than a year old), and personality, before emailing a select few of these for my review.

One of the dogs, Annie, captured my heart very quickly from the photo and description. She was a 45-pound border collie mix who loved to run, and her half-black-half-white face looked like a little harlequin and made me smile. With her mostly black coloring accented with white, she was also color-coordinated with Jack – a plus, although not a requirement.

I filled out an online application for adoption to at least get to meet Annie. Stu and I were certainly willing to drive to Bradenton to see her, which is just over one hour from our home. Within a day, Annie’s foster mother had called me and we had talked. Everything she said about Annie sounded perfect, and she offered to bring Annie to our house since they were with their dogs on the east coast and would be driving through this area anyway.

When the family brought Annie to our home, she was released into our large fenced yard and immediately began running and playing actively with Jack as if they were old friends. Their interaction was peaceful, since she was a little shy and willing to accept his “alpha dog” status immediately. And he was willing to let her get in his round plastic wading pool, of which he is normally very possessive. Annie was also very affectionate to both of us almost immediately, and of course I fell in love with her almost at first touch. The foster mother said she would leave Annie with us and if everything worked out would mail us the paperwork for completion. This was an act of trust that we appreciated.

The next two days were fun but crazy as we helped Annie acclimate to our routine. She was a little hesitant to eat her meals, and we had to put her and her food bowl in a closed room away from Jack to ensure that he would not scarf it down before she could touch it. She also seemed to have a great desire to be outdoors all the time; she would sit under the palm tree and gaze out at the lake as if she wanted to be out there herself. She had a quiet wistfulness about her behavior that touched me, and to which I could relate. And the interaction between the two dogs got better all the time, with Annie starting to assert herself a little bit. They provided such exercise and joy for each other in our large yard, and it was a delight to see.

The morning of the third day, I awoke to find that Stu had left both dogs outside in the yard for nearly an hour. We had been warned by the foster family that Annie had escaped several times from their makeshift yard fence, but that she had always returned home. The foster mother had looked at our professionally-installed 4-foot chain link fence and agreed that this should not be a problem, but we were all aware of the superior intelligence of dogs with border collie genes, so we were keeping watch.

Imagine my surprise (and Stu’s) to discover that Annie was walking around the OUTSIDE of the fenced yard, heading directly for busy Main Street on the side street. In fact, a car turning on to the side street literally had to stop mid-turn to avoid hitting her. We quickly went to the front of the house and coaxed her to us on the front porch and back inside the house.

Stu immediately went outside to begin his detective effort to find the weak place in the fence which had allowed Annie to escape. A few minutes later, he beckoned me outside where we could see a white lawn chair up against the fence with muddy paw prints on the seat and going up the back.

After carefully considering the situation, we knew we would need to send her back, despite the fact that she had bonded with me, with Stu and with Jack – and of course, we with her as well. An escape onto Main Street with its constant and often speeding traffic could be an immediate death sentence for a dog. When we are driving, we dislike having to watch constantly for a couple of small strays that always seem to be on the roads around here, so we would never wish that on other drivers. But worst of all, we knew that Jack was apt to learn habits from other dogs, and having another dog teach Jack to escape would risk his life as well. Jack is the best dog either of us has ever owned in our lives, and is so precious to us that we could not take that risk.

We contacted the former foster mother, who agreed to drive to us the next day and retrieve Annie. We’re certain she will find her a good home, since she was such a darling and mostly well behaved young dog. And some lucky family will get a great, affectionate, smart, active young dog in Annie.

While this story had a somewhat sad ending for me personally, it could have been a lot sadder had either dog been hit by a car. And we have decided that we will remain a one-dog family until such time as we can sell this big house on Main Street and move into a smaller house better suited for two adults. The new house, however, must have a decent sized fenced yard.