Personalities

When reminiscing about Auntie Annie, I started wondering what friends of ours Tobey and Eli will remember in their childhood as having certain personalities. If it will at all resemble the different knights of the "round dinner table" that all of the Cantonese parents sat around for hours on end, laughing and talking over tea and desserts, holiday after holiday after holiday.

And I realized, I had a taste of it recently when playing poker last weekend. Around the table was a lot of old friends, and a couple of new as one guy brought a girlfriend and another his new wife. Each person around the table was a distinct dot in the spectrum of personalities from lively center of attention to calm voice of reason and everything in between: spacey ("oh, my turn?"), wiley, play by the rules, butt of all jokes, instigator, quiet thinker, poser (which this time was me; I didn't think I really knew how to play but I had the highest earnings of the night).

I must say when we walked in the house to be greeted by all these old friends, there was something definitely familiar and comfortable about this group. We don't all hang out regularly (in this large group was a subset poker group that does play more regularly) but I think that makes all the personalities fonder. We had a ton of memories when we were (almost) all in the same small group at our old church. But we probably drove each other crazy back then whereas now the variety of personalities is charming. Such was the same as the old Cantonese gang. We mostly saw them on holidays and sometimes a little in between. But they weren't the folk we hung out with every weekend, or saw at church, or went to school with.

This time we left Tobey and Eli at home with my parents so that we could actually play a few hands of poker without interruption. And while we did pass around our cameraphones to show everyone pictures of our kids, maybe next time we'll actually bring the kids, so they can see some crazy personalities in action.