Suitable Enough

            Math has never been my strong suit.  Neither have cards or fashion.

            Long before math phobia could claim me, I believed in the mystery of numbers.  As a first-grader, I took a field trip to a second-grade classroom.  Concentrating hard on a subtraction worksheet, I deduced that all the problems mysteriously led to zeros.  Thus, I should not have been stunned later to see a big “zero” on the top of the page:  there is nothing like getting all the answers wrong, in spades.

            My sister and I could while away long afternoon hours as our own canasta club.   What I loved about the game was having so many cards in hand.  I liked arranging them in ascending order according to suit and fanning them out expertly in my hand.  The rules I do not recall.

            One of my more memorable grade school fashion moments involved a pair of jeans and a short length of rope.  I threaded the rope through my belt loops and knotted it tight, imagining my ramrod-straight, grade-school self to now resemble a big-hearted TV star:  the curvy Elly May Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies.

            “What do all these silly stories add up to?” you may well ask.   In my best pedagogic fashion, I will counter your question with my own:  “What do you think?”  That at least gives me a moment to concoct my own answer—which, to be truthful, revealed itself to me sometime between the opening line and The Beverly Hillbillies. 

It seems that my writing process provides the most suitable answer:  I started with a pun—and no idea where I was going.  But, as I thought and wrote, I found myself in pursuit of details that eventually led somewhere, for me at least:  I am a connect-the-dots type, not a big-picture person.  It’s up to you to figure out which suit is missing.