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Column: Pala grandmother known for tamales and poker games


Filed Under: California | Opinion
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Lucille Lugo, a grandmother from the Pala Band of Mission Indians in California, was known for her tamales and her love of poker:
She’d unfurl a woolen blanket onto the kitchen table to keep the cards and poker chips from sliding. There was a kind of ritual to the start of the games. She’d take her lucky seat, players would ante up, she’d shuffle, then deal.

One by one, she’d spread her cards and look at her hand. She had no tell. There was no way to look at her eyes, her mouth, her face and know if she had a good hand or a bust. The games would commence.

Lucille Lugo, my ex-wife’s grandmother, loved to gamble.

She’d call to my wife, “Come on over Baby Girl,” and the cards would come out. The chips would get stacked, and the stories and the laughter would begin.

She lived in a small house at the edge of the Pala Indian Reservation village, a Bureau of Indian Affairs house painted a baby blue, tucked in close to an orange grove. In spring, the scent of orange blossoms perfumed her house, making it smell almost tropical. The blossoms also collected on Jimmy Belcone’s 1940s convertible Chevy, the car that quit running one night and just never left.

The skeletal remains of the family’s old house stood just across the way, but she was settled into the new, and the old house slipped into decay. On winter days, she’d sit close to an electric heater, her arthritic fingers busied with knitting needles turning yarn into Afghans, cup of coffee close to her elbow. She always had a pot of coffee perking in the kitchen. And if she wasn’t knitting, she played solitaire.

Get the Story:
Gordon Johnson: Laughter, food and some serious poker (The Riverside Press-Enterprise 4/4)

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