Jadyne and I, both avid bridge players, left Santa Rosa fourteen years ago to a relatively unfamiliar community, the East Bay. In addition to searching for competent plumbers, hardware stores, groceries, restaurants, good pizza, and the like, we needed to fill the hole in our card-playing life previously occupied by weekly bridge games with North Bay friends.
We found that the Berkeley Jewish Community Center sponsored weekly bridge games, and we joined. It was there that we met Scott and Beth Wachenheim, a couple who had lived in a central coast area in an equine community that one of their horses came from originally and loved. He (the horse) convinced them to escape Lafayette which was changing too fast. Scott and Beth were former teachers, who had taken up residence in Berkeley and were on the same mission as we were.
Dissatisfied with the poor play at the JCC, we four broke away from the weekly bridge nights there and began our own four person bridge nights, alternating between their Creston Avenue home in Berkeley and ours on Rugby Avenue in Kensington. We became more than bridge partners, enjoying each others’ company for dinners, sharing mutual interests, talking about our children and grandchildren, and celebrating special occasions.
We were pleased to join them for their seventieth birthdays at Greens, a vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason, San Francisco.
Scott is sitting second from left, looking away from the camera, and Beth is in maroon, just left of center.
Scott has Parkinson’s disease. In the ten years or so that we have known them we have also noticed a small decline in his physical condition. They used to travel extensively, many times with their grandson Dakota. Those days, we suspect, may be coming to an end. Scott also has “restless legs syndrome”, and the hot tub that they had on Creston Avenue was a source of relief and comfort to him. Last year Scott’s infirmities prompted them to leave Berkeley and move to Rossmoor in Lafayette, a huge retirement community with a golf course, restaurant, swimming pools, daily club meetings, exercise programs. In a sign of the changing times Rossmore even hosts a “Cannabis Club. No more gardening, no more house maintenance, it’s all taken care of for them.
In an earlier life they both taught elementary school. In an earlier life, too, they created a business in Lafayette in the middle seventies that was designed to lose money for seven years so that they wouldn't have to pay taxes, money that would have gone to support a very unpopular war. In an earlier life they were also both avid equestrians, having ridden the Pony Express route, a twenty-four hour distance run {The Tevis endurance race, a precursor to the human version), officially called "The Western States 100 Championship", riding in Escalante and Torrey. In Scott's words, "we rode Valour and Ria up Boulder Mountain, although several champion horses ahead of us tried to turn around dangerously, but we finished the fifty miler of that day and went on to complete the three day ride." They’ve ridden through the desolation of Nevada, and through a large part of the United States. We asked about Scott’s Parkinson’s disease. “How did you discover it?” Scott added, "Dansky, a female, asked why I was no longer using my left leg to cue her. She wanted a correction. She wanted me to continue skillfully to ride her. She begged me not to quit, saying she'd be good and not give me trouble." Puzzled, we asked Beth to explain. “She told me that Scott couldn’t ride her any longer, that he was physically unable to manage her.” Nonplussed, we searched for an explanation. “She told you?” we questioned. “Yes,” she answered.
This didn’t surprise us. Earlier we had teamed up to buy a case of homemade salad dressing from one of Jadyne’s sister-in-law’s friends in Colorado. When Beth’s check was lost, she said, “I should have waited.” “Why?” we asked. She answered, “Because Mercury is in retrograde.” “Uh-huh”, we both thought, exchanging glances. We pretended that we knew what that was all about. When we returned home we went to Wikipedia. You don’t conduct business when Mercury is in retrograde. That, we discovered, was why the check was lost.
I asked Scott to edit my blog for accuracy. He wrote, "We are honored that you would find us people of importance in your life. And yes, Beth's belief system isn't quite standard. Scott's is possibly unstandard also."
Scott and Beth introduced us to AJ Lee and the Tuttles at another of their parties:
Entranced by the incredible skill of these musicians I went to see them at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage and promptly fell in love with Molly Tuttle, the oldest “child” in this musical family. She was twenty-three, and I was sixty-eight. I was married; she's single. She's one of the finest acoustic guitar players in the country. I suck. It was a relationship doomed from the start.
We had dinner last night with Scott and Beth at the appropriately named "Chow" in Lafayette, chosen by Scott and Beth because of the good "vibe" and because all foods are organic and locally sourced. (They turned up their noses one time when we told them we were going to Sizzler.) Chow was no Sizzler. "Thank you," Scott said at the end of the evening, "for not abandoning us." Rossmoor is about forty-five minutes away, an inconvenient drive, and we won't see them as often as we did when they lived in Berkeley, but we won't abandon them. We don't abandon friends.
May 9, 2021. Scott died. Beth emailed us three days later. “He’s sent signs that he is well,” she wrote.