Playing Cards, The Club Family

Long before I started this blog, I was pregnant with my first child.  Around that same time, my husband bought a scanner, the same one I use today.

Here is one of the very first things I scanned:

As a young child I was obsessed with cards.  One of the best gifts I ever received growing up was:

According to Hoyle

We were obsessed with proper rules and any impasse was solved by consulting Hoyle.

Who was Hoyle?  A single man or a composit of many?  Or some sort of God of Cards, Bunyon-like, using the Grand Mesa as his card table, smoking a rocket of a cigar?

After my son was born, I experienced a welling of creative energy that produced, among other things, a series of face cards.  I printed them out as greeting cards and brought them to a book store that had just opened in downtown Tucson.  The owner wore knee boots and a short skirt and the walls were lined with books to the high ceiling, the bright Tucson sun casting crisp shadows across the hardwood floor.  She said she'd take them if they were colored in.  But, she added, artists are so irresponsible that she was sure I would never get around to doing it.

So I went home and learned some very basic photoshop, and colored them all in.

**********

The Queen of Clubs is a master mahjong player.

The King of Clubs spends most of his day alone in his library.

The Jack of Clubs often stays out all night, in disguise,

playing poker in country pubs.

**********

Surprised when I came back the next week, the owner bought a couple of sets, and dumb ass that I am, I didn't even buy a book.  I had bought one last time I was in.  I thought that was good enough.

a book in which Michelangelo bribes
his way into the church's morgue
 to disset and draw cadavers
alone and by candle light
in the wee hours
of night

A couple of months after she bought my cards, the book store closed.

And not long after that, we moved.