Lehal Library

Adding fuel to the fire: Years later, in encountering a government official, I asked him about that particular site, without reference to why I was interested. He related to me that it was a special federal research installation. It was being constructed just about the time I was there. Evidently it is still not common knowledge, or at least I don’t want to take that chance. Therefore, the location as indicated in my retelling is not the correct one. I still like to speculate as to what might have happened if I had kept the appointment in the out-ofbody state. Item: My company had received the franchise to install a cable television system in Charlottesville, Virginia, and we needed a receiving antenna site on top of a hill just outside of town. The owner of the hill was Roy, a small, balding, bright-blue-eyed energetic little man with a dry and subtle sense of humor. His face was wrinkled and tanned from many years of supervising the work in the twentythousand-apple-tree orchard atop the hill. As he was a true Scotsman, the negotiation was elaborately casual but came to a very reasonable and fair end. And we became friends. After lunch one Friday, he looked at me with a twinkle and asked, “Do you like to play cards?” An old familiar surge rose in me. “What kind of cards?” “Well,” he said, “some people don’t call it poker because we play so many wild games, but you can have a lot of fun at it. It’s only tenand twenty-cent games, so you can’t expect to make any money. We hold it at a different fellow’s house each Friday night and the only thing is, we don’t have any drinking. It’s the oldest, continuous poker game in the city of Charlottesville. Must have been going on steady for seventy years—and that’s a long time. If you would like to come tonight, I’ll pick you up, wherever you are, about seven-thirty. You’ll have a good time at choir practice.” I looked at him blankly. “Choir practice?” He smiled. “That’s what we call it here in Virginia. Some fellows say that they are not sure whether it’s legal or not and we’ve heard of other games being raided for gambling. Course, we aren’t doing anything like that.”