There's a domino hall on the east side of Lubbock that's been there longer than I've been retired, longer than I've been married, and pretty near longer than I've been alive. It's one big room with a concrete floor, a coffee pot that never gets washed, eight square tables with green tops worn shiny in the middle, and a sign over the door that says NO CUSSING NO SPITTING NO CARDS. The coffee is a quarter. It used to be a dime. We have been complaining about it since 1986.

The doors open at seven on Saturday mornings. By seven-fifteen every table's going, and the noise of all those dominoes slapping down on wood at once is a sound I'd know in my sleep. A good 42 player doesn't set his domino down. He slaps it, so the whole room knows he's proud of it.

1978. Ralph and I worked at the same gin back then. He was my foreman, and he was the best 42 player I had ever sat across from, which annoyed me considerably. Louis ran the feed store and Stanley drove a truck for the co-op, and the four of us kept bumping into each other at the hall. One Saturday in March we sat down together, and we've been sitting there since.

1982. Ralph plunged with four doubles and I named fives, and we took all seven. It is the single best hand I have ever seen in my life. It was also the last hand of a game we were losing six marks to one, and it won it. Louis did not speak for the rest of the morning.

1984. I trumped my own partner's trick. Ralph's. With the [5|4]. We were set, and Ralph has brought it up at least once a month for fifteen years. He brought it up last Saturday.

1991. Stanley had his bypass, and we played three-handed for six weeks with an empty chair, setting a domino in front of it every hand. Nobody wanted to bring in a substitute. When Stanley came back, the first thing he said was that his chair had been doing better than him all year.

1996. I retired from the gin. Corrine, that's my wife, asked what I was going to do with all my free time. I said play more 42. She said I didn't have more Saturdays than before. She was right, as usual, so I took up Tuesdays too.

1999. Louis is 64, the baby of the table, and still cuts the shake the same way he did in 1978, with his little finger out like he's drinking tea. Stanley is 74 and doing fine. Ralph is 72 and still the best player at the hall. I'm 65 and getting better, which is what I've said every year for fifty-seven years.

We switch partners every Saturday so nobody can say they're carrying anybody. Everybody draws a domino at the start, and the two highest play the two lowest. Then we play four games, sometimes five if Louis's wife hasn't called the hall yet. We count it by games won, each man for himself, since the partners change. Our house rules are the ones I wrote up on the special bids page: the shaker's stuck with 30 if everybody passes, doubles are their own suit in Nello, and a plunge is four marks.

Thirty-four Saturdays so far this year, four games every Saturday, through September 25. We missed five: one for the ice in January, one for Easter, one for Louis's granddaughter's wedding, and two in July when Ralph and his wife went to see their boy in San Antonio and the rest of us refused to play without him. Every man has played all 136 games.

Ralph has led the standings every year since 1978 except 1988, when I beat him by two games. I had a plaque made. It hangs in my den. Ralph says it's the only plaque in Texas for coming in first one time out of twenty-one, and he's probably right, and I don't care one bit.

Louis would like it noted that he had a very good July.