#107. The Last Potluck, 24, and West-Coast Baseball (Saturday, August 22, 2015)

What was your best day…of hanging out with the crew for one last time?

While my brother and I were growing up in Ottawa, my parents—or more correctly, my mom—had long maintained a large social circle of Chinese families. They would do things like share car-wash passes, coordinate heavily discounted group vacations, and meet up every Saturday afternoon to play cards (which, based on the loud shrieking noises I often heard, was quite competitive). And most of those families had kids my brother’s age (eight years younger), so growing up he always had a core group of friends he did everything with: elementary school, middle school, Chinese school, badminton, etc.

On this Saturday, we were all having a big potluck on the Quebec side, at a park next to a beach, where I—as this weird older man-child with nothing better to do—joined my brother and his friends in an extended series of activities. Frisbee, volleyball, catch, a two-hour hike through the forest, and a bunch of card games—namely, Japanese Napoleon (best game ever) and 24. From morning until sunset. Just ten guys hanging out outside on a beautiful summer day.

Side Note: To play 24, flip over four playing cards, then each player tries to use standard arithmetic operators to compute 24 with those numbers as quickly as possible. Extremely nerdy, but also surprisingly fun.

But why was this so special? It didn’t seem apparent at the time, but this turned out to be the last time so many of us would get together like this: as my brother and his childhood friends would soon start university and begin drifting apart—both from their families and from each other.

What really elevated this day, though, was what happened afterwards. The picnic ended in the early evening, so my brother and I went to this large Chinese buffet (which I used to go to all the time as a kid but hadn’t been to in over ten years) for dinner. And there, I excitedly explained to him how in ten minutes I could code an algorithm in MATLAB to compute the number of unsolvable combinations in the 24 card game our group had just been playing.

The coding would have to wait, though, because when I got home at ten, I remembered there was still a Blue Jays game to be played—since they were on the West Coast in Anaheim facing the Angels. And this was right in the middle of that insane run they had in the second half of 2015 (#116). After everything I’d already done that day, I still had an entire game of a once-in-a-generation Blue Jays team to watch!

A game in which the Jays decimated the Angels 15-3, as the playoff train kept moving. An perfect ending to an excellent day.