Saturday at Stitches

The alarm went off. Tigger groaned. We got up, ate breakfast at the diner, and were much, much busier at the market all day. Saturday is the big day at Stitches. Literally busloads of people come to the buy yarn. Our favorite moment in the day, however, was not the shoppers. It was when one of the maintenance guys came by and raved about our Kimono. He stood and stared at it, and kept telling us how beautiful it was. It is touching when a man truly cares about something that a person has knitted. This does not happen often.

We were also touched that many people had marked their the fashion-show program and had come to our booth specifically to look for our Kimono.

Kim was looking progressively more tired, so Cynthia sent her to the hallway to recuperate. She came back about 20 minutes later and said that she was lonely out there without Cynthia.

We are joined at the hip.

We decided to go to the casinos that evening since it was our last evening in Atlantic City, possibly forever. (Stitches will be at the Baltimore Inner Harbor next year.) We asked a couple of locals, and they recommended Harrah’s reef buffet. We got there around 8:00 and had to wait for the 9:30 seating for dinner.

When you have worked in a booth all day talking to lots and lots of people and have had very little lunch, you do not want to eat at 9:30. You want to eat NOW. We went to a coffee shop in the casino to get a snack. We chose to split an éclair, and as we were sitting there, the couple next to us offered us their extra ham sandwich and two bags of chips. We couldn’t pass up extra food and kindness, and thanked them.

As we were eating, the man suddenly tapped at Cynthia’s leg with his cane. He pointed to his wife. “We’ve been married 63 years as of the 24^th,” he said proudly. We were delighted to fuss over this news. You can't resist loving people who give you food and who are so dedicated to each other.

There was still an hour till dinner, so it was time to gamble. We had originally intended to spend at least $10.00. It turned out that the slots were incredibly confusing. We didn’t understand what the symbols meant, what it meant to play more than one line, what the buttons did. And they have done away with putting real money in and letting you pull a lever, in favor of a paper token and pushing a button. The levers didn't even seem to work. We were saddened by the lack of cups clinking with quarters, and it seemed more boring to push buttons with only paper tokens. And how would we play the two quarters that our friend Deb had given us when we couldn't put quarters in?

Everyone around us seemed to think playing was simple and fun. They were all so intensely watching the screens that we felt uncomfortable asking anyone any questions.

So we put in $5.00 without having a clue of what we were doing, other than we could see our “credits” fall like a rock. They fell even faster when Cynthia accidentally pushed the “max bet” button and couldn’t find an escape key.

After we lost our $5.00 so quickly, we were discouraged. We walked around and watched the people and the mirrors and listened to a loud band. We were able to get seated a little early for the buffet, and were greeted with an overwhelming choice of foods and desserts. It was a good buffet, but by the time we were finished, we were too tired to try to figure out anything more about the slots.

As we left the restaurant, all the employees kept telling us “good luck.” As we left the casino, we realized what it meant to us. We took a wrong turn and drove over a bridge to nowhere. We decided that they were saying, "Good luck getting back to Atlantic City!"

As luck would have it, we easily found a U-turn area, and got back to our hotel by 11. It was well past bedtime.