LETTERS FROM HOME: WE'VE GOT TROUBLE WITH A CAPITAL T THAT RHYMES WITH P

Feb. 3, 2000

Dear Patty,

One summer before I could drive was spent enthralled with the game of pool. Many hot afternoons I gathered enough coins for a Coke, a bag of peanuts and a game or two of snooker and walked six very hot blocks to the Pla-Mor on Broadway. There it was always cool inside, and green-topped tables were lined south to north like ships waiting to be sailed.

I liked the sounds, too, the click of ball against ball and even the squeak of cues being chalked, and the smell of talcum powder.

The walls were lined with red leather chairs that were extra tall so you could see the action on the tables everywhere in the long room.

Later I began to appreciate the geometric beauty of sparking stilled spheres into motion upon a field of green and sometimes to make them disappear, of spinning bodies that affect each other like planets in the heavens do.

The Pla-Mor was not a dingy pool hall from "The Hustler," filled with hard-drinking sharks and guppies. Lee and Irene Eaker, their son Bill and his wife Bee ran a place parents didn't mind their kids going to.

The Eakers' own grandkids were running around. You didn't throw wrappers on the floor at the Pla-Mor and you could get thrown out for cussing.

But pool halls attract characters no matter how they sparkle. You knew which guys were good and which guys were good but choked and which guys only played for money despite the "no gambling" signs.

Sometimes when strangers came in looking for a game, "He's a hustler" whispers ran up and down the room.

I ate my peanuts and watched.

My phone ringing late on a snowy Friday night at work was DC wondering when I was coming home. She needed help getting my Valentine's Day present into the house. A mixture of reactions appeared in my head at that moment. One of them was "uh-oh."

The bed of our pickup truck was filled by a large, flat box. When I came to the door, DC answered my quizzical look with the words, "It's a pool table."

My reaction was, once again, mixed. Right after we moved into our house, an auction was held down the street at the Lang house. One of the items was a pool table, an old-fashioned beauty. I wanted to bid on it but we still needed a dining room table and other essentials at the time. I heard someone nabbed the pool table for $500. I have mourned that pool table.

DC knows that. When we go to visit my sister's family in Cincinnati, you'll find me dueling a niece or a nephew at their pool table.

But real men know real pool tables don't come in flat boxes. This one was only a 7-footer, a streamlined version of a pool table that obviously required some assembly. DC thought assembling a pool table on a snowed-in Saturday sounded romantic.

Let's just say the day began with DC becoming distraught when we moved her desk and a couch out of the new billiard room knowing there was nowhere else to put them. And it ended many, many hours and very little romance later with a game of pool.

The table now occupies the room that was DC's study but was filled with things we didn't know where to put anywhere else. But no matter which direction the table -- north-south, east-west, northwest-by-southeast -- is aimed, the walls sometimes interfere with your backstroke.

DC says this is a test pool table, to see if pool really fits into our life and even into our house. If it does, we'll get a real pool table.

Do we turn our more spacious dining room into the pool room? Or do we knock out the back wall of the house and extend the porch westward to create a solarium/game room?

Maybe professor Harold Hill was right after all. We got trouble right here in River City. Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian