Small Losses and Much Deeper Ones

I had a pair of tens and he had a pair of nines, and all our chips were in the center after a flop of 8,4,2. There were about 2500 chips in the pot, enough to get me healthy and started in the right direction, enough to keep me surviving until my rush, until the cards turned my way and I could create some openings to build a stack and break out of the pack for a pay day.

Not tonight. Lady luck was in a perverse mood, and delivered two running hearts to give my donkey opponent a running nine-high flush. The painful part of poker is that you can do everything right and have everything turn into a disaster in twenty nine seconds of nine-high flush. A truly ugly way to lose. But it's a loss nonetheless. It's part of the game. You hope to win more than you lose, and have a few nights where most of those situations go your way and you make money. I make a few hundred dollars a month doing it, and one of these days I'll have a blessed evening or two and make a life-changing amount of money, because I know what I'm doing and I study what they're doing, and after an hour or so I have a pretty good idea of what they're going to do next. But even with the best of it, you have to get a little bit lucky to win.

There's another tournament at ten, a three-dollar entry fee with $3,000 guaranteed prize money, but I don't think I'll play. I'm a little tired and feel ragged, and that's never a good time to make decisions or compete in a contest of will and nerve and judgement. Tomorrow is another day. Today the sun was out, I had Sparky's Pizza for lunch, no gut churning phone calls, and a good workout. I was minus 4.40 in poker, but I'd count the day a total success.

I didn't hear from Marie though. I called her twice and left messages. I hope she's doing all right. She and her daughter were having trouble and had an awful quarrel the other day, the ugly kind of showdown only families can have, where every rage and resentment comes tumbling out and things are said that never should be, the deep hurts that only someone close to you can deliver, hurting you where all your sorrows are stored. You know the kind. It's terrible when we do that to each other, when anger wins over every impulse of grace and consideration, and all that's left of us is a raw nerve of wanting our way and the last word, and ugliness rules the moment, turning the very air into something sad and hateful and impossibly full of suffering and guilt, and we say the cruelest and most unreasonable things we can think of, not caring how brutal, how humiliating and out of control we are. That's an awful place, 90000 times more awful than a nine-high two card running flush, the sad wrenching ugliness that makes me panic, filled with the remembrance of all the worst moments of life, the brutal memory of unsafe and never-forgotten places, the pain of being completely human in an inhumane world. Family can be the most rewarding and healing thing in life, and it can be the most desperate and terrifying. How terrible to love someone so deeply and have them wound you to your very core. The words of vicious undignified uncontrolled anger, they resonate in our hearts forever. What an awful thing that can be. The hardest part is the day after, when the wounds are fresh and the tension is a physical weight in the room, a monstrous demon fueled by shame and regret and threatening to plunge us right back into the same unforgiving and horrible searing ugliness. Too often the Rager never apologizes or makes amends; they just expect everything to be smoothed over or forgotten, and too often again the anger is a weapon to keep everyone in their place, a little off balance, a little cowed and suppressed. "Walking on eggshells," the old saying goes, walking on eggshells to keep the cruelty at bay, to make the monster stop. But the monster doesn't stop. It's just waiting for another opening, another opportunity to swallow love whole and turn it into regret and defeat.

The capacity we have to hurt one another, to turn our lives into a shell of what they should be, is the worst part of what we are. How enormous is our need for grace, healing and mercy, and the wisdom of a forgiving God. Some of you know what I mean.