Words with Friends
The Story Team
Writing by Cynthia Overbeck Bix
Photos by Nancy Rubin
“There—that’s a fifteen!” says Eva, with a note of triumph in her voice.
Linda turns the Scrabble board to see the new word. “Well played!” she says. She scrutinizes her own rack of letter tiles.
Ashby Village member Eva 
Kertesz and volunteer Linda Jacobs are soon locked in on their weekly Scrabble game. Although they’re warm and friendly to photographer Nancy Rubin and me, those little tiles keep beckoning. Clearly, these two are serious players.
“When I first started visiting Eva,” says Linda, “I thought maybe I would take her out to lunch or to shop, or something like that. But we seem to be in our little groove of playing Scrabble.” She laughs. “We’re both pretty competitive—we play to win!”
Eva adds in her softly accented voice, “It’s not so much the winning as it is playing well. You’ve got to figure out the points you get, not just get a great word.”
Linda agrees—it’s the strategy of using all the triple and double letters. “Sometimes you can have a really long word and you get no points, but then you can make a three-letter word and you get, like, 30 points!”
The two play weekly, usually for about an hour - building the type of meaningful relationship that develop through the Connections Team. But, divulges Linda with a smile, “She cheats on me! She plays with a couple of people from Ashby Village, and a woman who lives here in the Watergate apartment complex comes over to play occasionally.”
“Nowadays I like to play board games,” says Eva. At 96 years old, she continues to give her fellow game players a heartily competitive match.
On the walls around the Scrabble table, a gallery of watercolor paintings lends color to the scene. There are images of luscious yellow roses, brilliant tropical parrots in vivid reds and greens, and arrangements of flowers rendered in delicate pastel tints.
In fact, Eva’s entire apartment is like a mini gallery. There are paintings here, there, and everywhere—even some unframed and leaning in a stack against the wall. As it turns out, the artist is Eva herself.
Above the couch hangs an especially eye-catching painting of two exuberant little girls, caught in mid-dance. When asked about the painting, Eva says, “That’s my granddaughter and a friend of hers. I painted it from a photograph.” She gestures around the room. “I did all of these.”
She’s modest about it, but when pressed, Eva says she has had quite a few shows around the East Bay over the years.
“She’s a very talented lady,” says Linda.
Eva says she painted strictly for pleasure. “I enjoyed doing it for many years. I painted even while my children were growing up.”
During those years, Eva was also busy working in her husband’s Bay Area dental office. Before that, her path to this area began long ago and far away. In the 1930s, when she was seventeen, she and her family left Germany for England. There, she attended university and met her future husband, who was from Czechoslovakia. After their marriage and the birth of their daughter, they came to California, where their son was born. Eva has made the Bay Area her home ever since.
For Linda, her visits with Eva are an important part of a community she has forged for herself since her retirement two years ago. Formerly manager of a busy medical office, she has turned her considerable energy and organizing skills to helping others in a variety of ways. The Connections Team is one of the ways Linda has found to build rich, rewarding reciprocal relationships.
“I knew when I retired that I would miss that feeling of community, so I wanted to create new communities,” she explains. “I started gearing up with Ashby Village around that time.”
Indeed, Linda is a volunteer extraordinaire. At Ashby Village, for example, she has been instrumental in helping to set up essential administrative systems. And on this particular visit with Eva, she has bustled in fresh from another Ashby Village volunteer gig. “Sorry I didn’t dress up for the photos,” she says, “But I just came from working on the big move.” (She’s referring to Painting the New Ashby Village Office.)
When she’s not busy with Ashby Village, Linda volunteers regularly at the Berkeley Humane Society. She loves the lively mix of people. “At Berkeley Humane it’s people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. So that’s fun. And of course at Ashby Village, the staff are in their fifties, but the members are generally in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. It’s endlessly interesting,” she says.
But in spite of her busy schedule, she wouldn’t miss her weekly Scrabble game with Eva. In fact, during our visit the two of them have become so absorbed in the board that Nancy and I decide to leave them to it. We say goodbye, and as we let ourselves out of the apartment, we can hear Eva saying, “O-L-D. Eight points. I always say, being old is better than the alternative!”