Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses? Come down from your fences. Open the gate.
Keeping your mind in shape
Posted by: Susan Marshall | Posted in: Cross Generational Experiences, Never too Old, Susan's MusingsMonday, April 21, 2008
I would not be just a nuffin’, My head all full of stuffin’, My heart all full of pain. I would dance and be merry, Life would be a ding-a-derry, If I only had a brain.
Use it or lose it
Rick, my husband, and I met at a bridge tournament in Casper, WY. Two years later we celebrated our marriage by honeymooning where else but….at a bridge tournament, this time in Denver (at its conclusion we also spent time in Yellowstone lest you think we are totally non-romantics)
So, what’s our attraction to the game of bridge? For people like Rick and me—who enjoy cards, board games, crossword puzzles and now Sudoku—bridge is a way to compete and continually flex our brains. But unlike those other challenges, bridge is also a way to develop new and rewarding friendships.
For me specifically, I love to gloat in the capacity of my brain to create solutions to—ok, I admit in—meaningless problems! After all, no one at the bridge table is forging world peace or creating a new vaccine, even if they may have earlier in their career.
When working, my mathematics degree served me well, as I applied plain ol’ logic to complex business, market, and technical problems. After retiring, and with the possibility of Alzheimer’s and dementia always looming for all of us as we age, I wanted to keep my brain in tip-top shape. I knew—from my three years of bridge playing in college—that the game was a lot like the business world. You have to have some knowledge of various systems, conventions, rules of thumb, guidelines and the like under your belt when you sit down at the card table, but mostly it boils down to judgment. There is no black-and-white answer. And there are often different solutions to a single problem.
Lots of people play “party” bridge and that’s how I started. You shuffle, deal the cards, and chat as you play—even trading for different partners ever so often. Rick and I play the more competitive form of “duplicate” bridge—where each hand you play is duplicated so that every other partnership plays the same exact hand. The goal is to find a solution that maximizes our team’s ranking against all the other teams trying to solve the same problem. And, like marriage, it requires excellent communication and well-honed trust with your partner. (I find it interesting that many happily married couples choose to “de-couple” at the bridge table to keep their marriages intact.)
We are often asked if we win money. Sadly, no. We win “glory points” that have no value other than bragging rights. Can’t even use them as we once did Green Stamps! Your first big goal is to become a “Life Master,” then advance to various flavors of life master: bronze, platinum, and the like.
I think a big reward, besides always exercising my brain, is the opportunity to travel and meet new friends. We play against retired doctors, lawyers, and educators. We battle with plumbers, judges, and business owners. And while every duplicate bridge player takes the game seriously, there’s also much laughter at the 
competition table as well.
We’ve even bumped into another couple, Roger and Patty, and discovered that they, too, met while playing the game….and married two years later. Like me, Patty is retired; Roger shares a technology career in common with Rick.
With so much in common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’ve become teammates and fast friends, visiting each other’s homes and traveling together to compete as teams at the big tournaments. We’ve made it a point to enjoy the food and attractions in the cities that host our competitions offer: Las Vegas and San Francisco in ’07, Boston and Salt Lake City later this year.
One of the biggest advantages of bridge is that you can do it no matter how old you are. Now, to be certain, you still will have certain age-based limitations. Case in point: Roger and Patty recently spent New Year’s Eve at our house and we played 72 hands of bridge…even with that none of us could stay awake until midnight. But, lest you think we have no stamina, let it be known that we’ve each demonstrated we can play tournament bridge 10 hours a day for three straight days—winning lots of match-ups along the way!
We’ve played against people with fading eyesight, advanced stages of MS, and various other physical ailments. Only if we were on top of our game, were we able to out-score many of them.
In my March 24 blog on aging well, I emphasized the importance of keeping a healthy body. But, as your body inevitably begins to slow down, it doesn’t mean your mind has to fade as well.
If not bridge, then take up bird watching, attend a course on American Literature (you’ve probably long forgotten what you learned in college), or get into computers. My 78 year old father-in-law maintains a local area network of eight computers….and they’re all in his house. Don’t ask!!
What do you do to keep your brain in shape?
