You may have noticed when I write about famine times I use the phrase “not having two cents to rub together.” It’s an idiom for being broke. Nowadays pennies are good for rubbing lottery scratchers, but during my childhood two pennies could buy a handful of candy. Sometimes we were rich; other times we were poor. Both states are relative. When we were rich, my father drove a Cadillac and my mother stayed home and played Mah Jong with her female family and friends. Plus, she had a once-a-week housekeeper. When we were poor, there were no card games because Ma had to work with my father at whatever new thing he was doing. I was the housekeeper, nobody went out to eat, and we walked instead of taking the bus. There were two main reasons why we flip-flopped from rich to poor so often. Both had to do with my father, who was the breadwinner and as such got fed the best parts of the braised chicken and had first dibs on the only couch pillow. My father was really good at going into business with other men and then annoying his partners so much by telling them how wrong they were that they would sabotage the business and ruin him. Some times you’re so smart, you’re stupid. The other thing he was really good at was gambling until he lost every penny he had. That’s what real gamblers do: they gamble to lose. Therefore, even when the business was good and cash flowed freely, it was a short term waterfall. A recovering gambler explained to me that a true gambler, no matter how well he or she knows the system, cannot walk away with winnings stuffed into their pockets. It makes them nervous. It makes them sick to their stomachs with tension. Gamblers know about streaks, another word for the universal swing from chaos to order. They know if they can just hang in there during a losing streak and keep playing, they will eventually arrive at the magical pinnacle of a winning streak. What they cannot do is quit while they are ahead. Sometimes they can make it out the casino door with their winnings intact, but the pressure carries them into a different casino where they play until they loose everything they have, including the lint in their pants pockets. Then they can go home feeling happy and optimistic, knowing when they return the odds are they will ride in on a winning streak. For me, a losing streak meant I had to be the the head cook and bottle washer. Also, new clothes were out of the question and old shoes had to last whether they fit or not. Another thing I learned about gamblers at a young age is that they are a superstitious tribe. My father once had a group over to play poker. This was not your laughable poker game of sitcom fame. This was a serious event where personal fortunes were literally at stake on the dining room table. I disobeyed my father’s command to remain out of sight and walked through the dining room into the kitchen to get a glass of water just as some male person was losing a hand. He shouted angrily that I had hexed him and he’d lost because I walked by at the wrong time, children being equivalent to a black cat crossing his path. The lesson I learned was gamblers were scary and stay away from poker games. The first time my parents took me to Las Vegas, I was eight years old. Age eight seemed to be a good time for several rites of passage. I was able to eat an entire hamburger. Therefore, I was old enough to be left at the pool while they gambled during the day and left in the hotel room while they gambled at night. They took me with them when they went to dinner shows and that’s why I can say I’ve spoken to most of the stars of the day: Tony Bennett, Cyd Charise, Rossano Brazzi. (Google them.) My parents would introduce me before they tucked me into bed and left for the night. One day they didn’t leave me at the pool; they took me to the old downtown area and parked me on the curb while they stepped inside a saloon for just five minutes’ play. What seemed like hours later, I started asking random women who came out the swinging doors if my mother was inside. Each one looked at me suspiciously and walked off without answering. I was obviously a shill of some sort. In fact, I was terrified of walking into that saloon or any casino by myself. There were huge signs saying no one under the age of 21 was allowed inside. I was certain that if I dared step into those dark caverns, I would be attacked by angry gamblers who feared I would jinx their next play. Sitting on a curb was a far better alternative. My Las Vegas days ended when my mother begged me to go with them for the weekend and keep $300 hidden on my person. She knew she didn’t have the nerve to refuse my father once he’d lost every penny and demanded more from her. She thought I could stand up to him. I knew better. I was done with them and their gambling. I refused to hide the bankroll; I refused to accompany them. I was eleven and could stay by myself until they returned home with empty pockets. Lest this journal entry sound too depressing, let me leave you with a happy lesson about gambling that my father taught me on purpose when I was five or six years old. There was a little park with rides, a sort of precursor to theme parks. My father had taken me there for the day, leaving mother at home, of course. He’d purchased a long string of tickets, but when we got to the last one I begged for more. He sat down and told me I had two choices. I could take the remaining ticket and go on one last ride or we could play a magic game where he would either make two tickets appear or make the last one vanish. I opted for the magic game, assuming Daddy would rig it and I’d win two rides. The sly old fox set me up for a teaching moment. He hid the remaining ticket under his thigh, said "Abracadabra" and … poof! Not one ticket, not two tickets, nothing but an empty chair seat. I was devastated. My father told me that’s the trick about gambling. I had a choice of keeping what I already owned and enjoying one last ride or gambling it away on the chance I might get two rides. A bird in the hand, etc. On that day I discarded the family gambling gene. It may have taken 40 years before I could overcome my loathing of Las Vegas, but now I am able to walk into a casino, enjoy many minutes by entertaining myself at nickel slot or poker machines, lose my $20 allotment, and call it an evening well spent. My sister, on the other hand, had a different teaching moment. Early in their marriage, she and her husband stopped off in Lake Tahoe to do a little gambling. She won a jackpot of $12,000, a huge windfall at that time. When she happily announced this to my mother, Ma put her hand to her cheek, shook her head from side to side in despair, and said, “Oy vey ist mir,” the Yiddish equivalent of “Oh, no!” Asked why she was despondent about such good news, she said “Winning big like that the first time is a curse.” “A curse? That’s crazy! What are you talking about, Ma?” “You win big like that the first time, you’re hooked for life. You’ll keep expecting to hit another jackpot. Wait. You’ll see. It’s a curse.” Ma was right. My sister was hooked, though not in the same way as my father. She always had car fare home. However, many years later, just before her first cancer surgery, when she thought she might wake up dead, the one thing she wanted to do was to go to a casino and gamble without restraint, betting away all she had to her heart’s content. If she had won, would she have been happy? I’m not so sure. She lost what she called A LOT, but she had a great time and didn’t feel the least bit guilty. After all, maybe she wouldn’t die during surgery. Then once she could get back to the casino she’d be due for a big winning streak. Gamblers. Go figure.