Solitaire

For half a day yesterday I had the world highest score in Grass Game's Yukon 3D Solitaire. Sadly now down to number nine. Remember when instead of tapping on an IPad we used to hold the packs in our hands and delight in the smoothness of each card as they slid across the card table? I used to visit my paternal grandparents Rubena and William Kelly in Parkes for holidays - they taught me to play crib. I loved moving the matches along the holes in the board and still remember grandma scoring and saying 'one for his nob and one for his heels'. We weren't allowed to play cards on Sundays. Weeknights after the game, Pa would sit quietly rocking in his oversized chair telling yarns about Parkes (or Bushman's as it was called) in the old days. Grandma would be crocheting brightly coloured squares to make rugs for the Red Cross. When I was about 10 or 12, grandma pointed to a photo on the mantlepiece above the fake log gas fire. It was a man with a black moustache playing the saxophone. 'That's your father, Kenny' she said. I nearly wet myself. When I was sixteen a gold clock encased in a glass dome joined the photo - the inner works spinning backwards and forwards counting their days. It was a gift for their Golden Wedding anniversary. I was just sixteen - it was the day I met my father. That's him second on the right playing the trumpet in George Stevens Night Owls dance band circa 1938.They used to play around the central west including the Strand in Orange where I guess he met my mother.