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If you are looking for Grandma, I have found her.
Your inheritance? Forget it. Especially the dimes and quarters.
P.S. She's not answering the cell phone.
It is buried in her purse below a table at the 10-Cent Walk-In Bingo hall, which opened Friday on Armenia Avenue in North Tampa.
Give her a few minutes.
She'll get back to you.
"I'm at bingo," Mary Azpeitia, close to 70, shouted into the phone, between rounds. "Don't call me at bingo."
In bingo circles, the skies opened Friday. The earth moved.
A new hall was born, filling a void we didn't even know we had.
Retirees like Azpeitia, along with a few homemakers and working folks, gathered.
Where once God had allowed a simple fabric store, there were rows of tables, stocked with bingo cards and little red chips.
Nearly 100 people sat down in that first hour alone, a two-thirds capacity crowd.
The players recognized each other from a now-closed bingo hall at Grand Plaza in Carrollwood. They talked about their surgeries and each other's children and the surgeries of each other's children.
"Look who's here," Mrs. Azpeitia said, welcoming 75-year-old Helen Marcus, a retired real estate agent.
Mrs. Marcus has been driving all the way to Countryside in Pinellas County for 10-cent bingo, so-named because you can play a card for a dime.
"I've never seen so many people I know," she said.
She looked around the room and counted 15 to 20 of them.
The players spotted a couple from North Carolina who own a mobile home in Tampa.
"All the way from Carolina," Mrs. Azpeitia marveled, as if to say, "Ah, the power of bingo."
She sat with her friends Robert Granado, 82, and Enrique Garcia, 62, whom she met at Grand Plaza.
There was no sign of the Grand Plaza player they once knew who played bingo while smoking cigarettes and using an oxygen tank.
"You're going to blow everyone up," Mrs. Azpeitia used to warn her.
Mrs. Azpeitia stocks her table with good luck charms: a tiny gold angel and pink plastic hearts.
Whenever she gets close to a win, she puts a heart in the spot that needs a winning number.
Her favorite numbers are 7 and 11, drawn from her birthday (Aug. 7) and her deceased husband's birthday (Jan. 11). She chooses bingo cards with those numbers.
Granado just picks his cards randomly.
"And I'm lucky," he said. "I win."
"Yeah, he's real lucky," Mrs. Azpeitia agreed.
She knows that he once won $425 at another bingo hall.
Midway,Granado switched from green cards to the pricier blue cards, increasing the payoff if he wins.
I asked him to explain but saw the look on his face. I was the equivalent of a cell phone call.
His head was too full of numbers.
"Right now, I can't talk," he said.
Granado stepped up the ante again, buying red boards which have a bigger payout, at a happy hour price of three for 50 cents.
He's a bingo maniac, I noted aloud.
"I know," said Mrs. Azpeitia, chuckling.
"You can make money or lose it, either one," Granado said.
"I'm here to make money."
Mrs. Azpeitia was having an off day.
Her pink hearts were going unused.
"And my poor baby," she said, picking up the gold angel.
Finally, it came.
The bingo moment that lucky Granado had been waiting for.
It was a horizontal row of four letters plus the free space.
"BINGO!" he yelled.
The payoff: $7.
The cost in cards: $22.
Finding a new bingo hall in North Tampa: priceless.
- Tampa's Kennedy Boulevard was once called Grand Central. Now Grand Central is the name of a weekly column by Times senior editor Patty Ryan. Reach Patty Ryan at 226-3382 or pryan@sptimes.com