text: That summer I'd been hired as a temporary replacement drummer for the band backing bluesman Jailhouse Lemon Lee on a tour through the southwest. In the small hours on the road from somewhere to someplace, I asked Lee, then in his late 70s and blind since birth, how he managed to hold his own in the endless nickel and dime Five Card Stud games that we played to kill the road hours. I suspected that as the New Guy that I was being set up as a mark in a long con because I'd played in dozens of games and while Lee didn't consistently win, he rarely lost big. I couldn't figure out how he did it. I asked. From behind his aviator sunglasses Lee told me he used mirrors. Then he chuckled and settled back in his seat and started quietly chanting lyrics to songs unwritten, his baritone barely above a whisper, the music more felt than heard. The blues poetry of midnight trains and hound dogs, of prison, times good and times hard, and throughout ran the thread of love and lost and loved and lost again, all in 16 bars. And then he was finished. I should have left the lingering magic alone, but I didn't. "But how do you see things? How do you know those playing cards? How can you even describe a color like pink? Spell broken, we were back on the tour bus with diesel fumes and near-sprung shocks, stale beer, snoring, road thrum. The eastern sky hinted pale blue. He sighed, like a man explaining a simple concept to a child: pink was meeting the girl next door for the first time, your first kiss, how she looked on her wedding day, your first child, and how you chose to remember her the last time you were with her, when friends and family quietly stepped out of the room to give you some last time alone. He was a widower pushing three decades by that time. He never spilled about the playing cards. But that's how he explained the color pink.