Card Tournament

I am in a card tournament. The game is called Spite and Malice and only one person can be the winner of any round. The first player to win 10 games wins a bottle of Strawberry champagne. The tournament has been going for slightly more than a week, and one player has already scored 8 games.
Everyone is beginning to sharpen their cut-throat strategies to prevent that player from winning, but since there is little or no strategy to playing Spite and malice, it's going to be the luck of the draw.

Everyone has made comments about what they would do if they won the bottle, some saying they would share with the other players, some saying they would take it home. The discussion about sharing or not made me think of an incident that happened many years ago when my daughter was about 7 years old.

An artist friend from New York, was visiting friends and family in Los Angeles. We lived in Fontana, CA at that time and invited him to come spend a week with us. It was a delightful visit, and we promised to see him again in Los Angeles before he returned to New York.

One Sunday afternoon we drove from Fontana into L A, to see him, taking a fancy decorated cake and a chilled bottle of Cold Duck with us. We were warmly greeted and not long after we had arrived the cake and champagne were served. My daughter was very young, about 7 or 8 and she begged to have a taste of the wine. After a moment, I did give her permission to have a taste of the champagne, but only a tiny sip.

Everyone was busy chatting and toasting each others health, and I noticed my daughter being a proper little lady holding her glass with the several drops of champagne and making it last as long as possible.

The room we were in was unusually large with a massive fireplace on one wall and a huge bay window opposite. Those of us who were artists and painters commented that the room would make and ideal studio and as we envisioned the possibilities, we heard a sudden loud crash that sounded like breaking glass.

As we all turned to look in the direction of the fireplace where the sound came from, we could see the shards of a wine glass, broken into a hundred pieces. We were dumbstruck!

Then I noticed my daughter standing there without her glass. She had hurled it across that huge room into the fireplace! I gasped and sputtered and it was a moment before I could ask her why she had done such a thing. Apparently she had seen it done in a movie.

Thank heavens it was not an expensive wine glass.



Broken Champagne Glasses