The Empty Folding Chair
My daughter saved me a seat in the third row. I was in the parking lot with a radio.
Children count the moments a parent is physically present but mentally elsewhere, and a gambling habit spends those moments quietly. Being fully there for a small ordinary evening is worth more than anything a bet can return. Help is available at 1-800-MY-RESET.
My daughter Lorraine was nine the year she played a snowflake in the school pageant. She had one line, and she practiced it on me for three weeks at the kitchen table. "I am the first one down, and I am the quietest." I told her it was the best line in the show. I meant it.
She saved me a seat in the third row. She told me so twice that morning.
I made it to the school, I want to be fair to myself on that. I wore my good jacket. I sat in the folding chair. But I had two dollars of my own and fifty of somebody else's riding on a fight in Chicago, and a little radio in my coat pocket with one earbud, the cord run up my sleeve like a spy. While my daughter stood in a paper costume and said the only line she had, I was listening to a round that cost me everything in the jacket.
She found me in the crowd afterward. She did not ask if I liked it. She asked, "Did you hear me?" and I said of course, and she looked at my face for a long moment, the way kids do when they already know.
Here is what I understand now, at eighty-four. A kid can tell the difference between a chair that is empty and a chair that is occupied by a man who is somewhere else. The second one hurts more, because it looks like love from across the room.
Gambling rarely takes the whole evening. It takes the middle of it, the part where you were supposed to be looking. You will not get the night back, and the line is only said once.
If part of you is always listening for something else, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET.
Take out the earbud and look up.
Sal