How odd that the image of Charlie Grinstead should come to mind in such perfect detail after a 40 year hiatus. I don’t think that I ever spoke a word to him during the two years our lives overlapped at college, and I haven’t kept up with any college friends, so there is no obvious reason, but here he is. I can see his wad of curly hair, respectfully unkempt, unlike the shaggy hair of other classmates who aspired to a hippie look. Long hair on both men and women was certainly the look of the era, and women would spend many hours carefully tending and trimming split ends and brushing it to a glossy sheen. But the men were only on a quest for quantity and not quality. Some men even used bare rubber bands – women knew better – these would catch and break hair off, but the men never cared. While Charlie’s hair might have been a bit wild, I don’t think that it ever went over his ears, and it always had a straight part.
The standard outfit for guys was blue jeans, preferably a pair of well worn 501 Levi’s with a button fly. There was no such thing as pre-washed jeans in the 1970s, and a new pair of Levi’s took a concerted and uncomfortable effort to achieve the target faded knees, often accompanied by an imprint of a wallet in the back pocket. There was usually a few month interlude when the jeans were optimally worked in and faded, and then suddenly the knee would give way. There were two choices at that point. The guy could transition to cut-offs with the white ragged edges of the shorn jeans getting progressively longer and more matted with each washing. Or if the guy was really lucky, he might find a girlfriend to sew colorful patches on frayed knees – I remember being quite pleased the few times I was pressed into such service. Charlie probably never faced this big decision. He always wore a pair of well-fitting khaki pants with a thin black belt.
Shirts for guys were a standard white T-shirt. This was in the pre-Nike era, before the tags moved from the inside collar to blazoned on the breast. There were no logos, no endorsements. I suppose a few T-shirts could have been tie-dyed, after all this was the hey-day of the Grateful Dead, and maybe a T-shirt could say “Property of Pomona Athletic Department,” brazenly announcing that it was stolen, but most days, the T-shirts were just plain white, or maybe grey. Charlie always wore a collared, buttoned-up short-sleeved shirt, and I could be succumbing to stereotypes here, but he might also have sported a pocket protector.
Now why should this image percolate to the surface just now and why did my brain carefully tuck it away in the dusty recesses in the first place? The answer is bridge. 
Suddenly I find myself playing somewhat competitive bridge on a weekly basis, taking me back to my college days when I first learned. Charlie was a bridge player, and I remember watching him and realizing that bridge could offer me a way in. There I was, a timid freshman, a mid-Westerner arriving in California from an all-girls school, desperately wondering how I was going to fit in. I knew that I was never going to become a member of the hard-partying elite. I tried hard, but absolutely loathed the taste of beer, and I don’t know why, but I just had no interest in smoking weed. But at the same time, I didn’t think of myself as a social outcast – I hoped that I had something to offer, but I wasn’t sure what.
During the week, the custom was to sit in the large common room after dinner and watch television for a bit until people dispersed, supposedly to their studies. I am not sure who had control of the channel (the TV might not even have had a clicker), but every night, the TV was resolutely set to reruns of the Wild, Wild West and Star Trek. I would have been happy to join the group to watch TV (reruns of the Dick Van Dyke Show would have been most welcome) but I had no interest in fantasy shows, and to this day I have never seen an episode of Star Trek. So what to do? And then I discovered a splinter group that played bridge, which seemed to carry some cachet that crossed the boundaries of the typical cliques. And Charlie was an enthusiastic and much sought after partner. By all outward appearances here was a goofy guy, someone who probably would never be considered a member of the social elite, but the singular thing I remember about Charlie was that he simply didn’t care. I could be completely wrong, maybe he was a tortured soul, but from my vantage point of outside looking in, he appeared to be a person who was entirely comfortable with who he was, thick rimmed black glasses, pocket protector and all. He just had a joyful presence that I really admired. And bridge was the great equalizer and common bond.
I began to hang around the fringes of the bridge table to capitalize on the limited strategies my mother had taught me – the point counting system to assess your hand, and the essential strategy of the finesse, i.e. how to neutralize your opponent’s king and capture it with the ace, and the importance of getting the trump out, i.e. “getting the bad boys off the street.” Bridge really isn’t that hard if you have some basic card sense, but it has an intimidating reputation, and I remember my quavering nerves when I first took my seat at the bridge table. I would secretly hope to be on defense, which would allow me to keep my hand to myself, thus concealing any egregious blunders. However, if I was the dummy, I would have to lay down my hand for everyone to see. It was judgment time. Immediately I would sense my partner adding up my points, nervous that he would purse his lips or sigh in disappointment if we had either overbid or more likely underbid, since I had a hair trigger for passing. But playing defense had its own terrors, mainly leading. While it might be tempting to lead an ace, it would only delay the problem, since I would just have to lead again. Furthermore, perhaps it would be better to lay in wait, and use my ace to capture the opponent’s king. If I led the ace, it would “put pants on the king,” as my mother used to say. But on the other hand, I might not ever get another chance to play it, and you certainly didn’t want to go to bed with a winning ace in your hand. And then there is the moment, midway through the hand, where you have to make another lead, hopefully to a winning card in your partner’s hand. I remember playing with some particularly pissy opponents, who could totally undermine my confidence by saying, “Oh, thanks for that lead, I couldn’t have won without your help.”
If I ever actually won the bid and was in charge of playing the hand, my partner, now the dummy, would usually come behind me and direct traffic. This was not necessarily a learning experience, since he would just point at my cards to lead or to play. I remember people asking me about my medical residency and why newly-minted interns are forced to work punitive hours making critical decisions. Well, on a much more forgiving level, it is the same with bridge. You simply can’t learn unless you are at risk yourself and willing to deal with the consequences. So I stuck with it and eventually soloed with some limited success and developed a circle of diverse friends.
I never did play with Charlie. Bridge-wise he was out of my league. And here is another interesting thing about bridge. It seems to be a surrogate for intelligence. I remember people saying, “Oh that’s Charlie Grinstead, he’s really good at bridge.” Nobody would ever be so tacky to discuss SAT scores, the Dean’s list or other trappings of intelligence. All you had to do is say that someone was good at bridge and that said it all. It is common 
knowledge that both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet like to spend their idle hours playing high level bridge on the internet. This probably implies as much about their intelligence as the success of MicroSoft or Berkshire Hathaway.
I am currently playing in a bridge league of sorts, where my assigned partner and I play a series of six different opponents, all of whom are much more experienced and many have even taken lessons. This is a startling fact, since I perceive Bridge as a game, and one of the distinctions between a game and a sport, for example, is that all games should be self taught. You wouldn’t pay someone to instruct you in Monopoly or even chess (unless you want to play at freakishly elite levels). But the lessons have paid off, and my new peer group has a firm grasp on different bidding conventions that slyly communicate the exact strength of a hand and the number of cards in each suit. This is a far cry from the simple conventions of my college-era Bridge, and I find myself feeling the same anxieties of 40 years ago – a little too eager to pass, blundering the lead, fumbling the bidding convention – Stayman, Blackwood, Gerber, and now there are many more. The best that might be said of me is that on a good day perhaps I have decent card sense. We have yet to play an opponent named Jill, but every time her name comes up, someone inevitably says, “Oh she is a good bridge player,” and that is what made me think of Charlie Grinstead.
Yesterday I went on the internet to see if I could discover what had happened to Charlie. The only slight gap in my memory was that I was spelling his name with an “m” instead of an “n,” but once I straightened that out, I discovered that he has a PhD in math and is a college professor. Additionally, he has published an introductory textbook on probability theory. How perfect, since the successful bridge finesse is all about probability.
The missing words in the following poem are two sets anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks or dashes indicates the number of letters. Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.
I started out as a timid freshman, a nervous and innocent coed
Wondering who’d sit with me at dinner, I’d enter the dining hall with *****
It was at this – – – – – in life I discovered that bridge could give me a start
If I could overcame my worry that the game was reserved for the super smart.
But you don’t have to make it complicated, don’t succumb to the mystique.
Just know a few conventions and maybe ***** your points before you speak.
I never ***** to dream that I could be more than a journeyman or tough to beat.
But if you do – – – – – good as Bill – – – – – , then you’re certainly among the elite.
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Dread, stage, readd, dared, get as, Gates
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