#99. 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 – who would do things like share car-wash passes, coordinate heavily-discounted group vacation packages, and meet up every Saturday afternoon to play cards¹. And most of those families had kids my brother’s age (eight years younger), so growing up he always had that core group of friends that he would do everything with: elementary school, middle school, Chinese school, badminton, etc.

On this Saturday, we were all having this big potluck at a park on the Quebec side² that was next to some 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 twelve guys hanging out outside on a beautiful summer day.

But why was this so special? It didn’t seem that apparent at the time, but this turned out to be the last time so many of us got together for something 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 (that I used to go to all the time as a kid but hadn’t actually been to in ten-plus 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 game³ we were just playing.

The coding would have to wait, though, because once I got home at ten, I remembered that there was still a Blue Jays baseball 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 (#107). After all the things I had already done on this 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 excellent ending to an excellent day.

1. I never bothered to learn the rules, but from the loud shrieking noises that I often heard coming out of it, it was quite competitive.
2. Quick geography primer. Ottawa is located right on Ontario’s border with Quebec – that Canadian province where they speak French. Which makes for a very interesting cultural dynamic for the whole region.
3. Flip over four playing cards, then each player tries to use the standard arithmetic operators (plus, minus, multiple, divide, power, brackets) to compute 24 with those numbers as quickly as possible. Extremely nerdy, but also surprisingly fun.