My dad loved card games, and was an excellent card player; he played solitaire at work, eventually on a computer, for ages, passing the time. Canasta was big at one point, among the relatives during family reunions, bridge too. Two of my mom’s siblings were grand-master bridge players, until one dropped out (Aunt Polly) because the other (Uncle Norbert) was flagrantly screwing around on his wife (Aunt Sally) amidst the lady bridge players. There came a time when she could no longer stomach the stress of hearing gossip about her younger brother, and more. She saw what he was doing; it was ruining her pleasure in the game, and in traveling to various tournaments. They had different last names, and didn’t look at all alike; no one knew they were related.
My dad and mom played pinochle with my grandparents often on a Sunday night during my childhood; these were after dinner games that were the only time I ever heard my mom curse at my dad, albeit curses that were pretty tame, ‘Dammit, Richard’ – that sort of thing. My dad always laughed, but in the midst of the game he was quite competitive; he liked to win. My grandmother, who was already going deaf by then, did what she did during our steak and potato dinners and, I suspect, in her daily, married life: she smiled and carried on, ignoring the drama, especially my grandfather’s criticism of her ability to play, or to remember old neighbors and friends. My mother despised my grandfather; listening to her avoid being openly hostile toward him during these games, and dinners, was a powerful lesson in pussy-footing bullshit and passive-aggression.
We played, their kids, lots of games of War and Gin, and eventually pinochle and canasta, too, although canasta fell out of favor early on (special scoring paper? too complicated?). My paternal grandmother taught me several versions of solitaire I still occasionally play. We learned and for a year at least were obsessed with a simple card game called ‘Spoons’, taught to us by my parents’ best friends, Bob and Carc. This was a type of musical chairs’ game, only sitting down and with spoons to grab placed in the middle of the table instead of chairs arranged for sitting. You had to get one of the spoons to survive each round, and how you got there – got to the moment the music/card playing stopped – had to do with someone achieving a pair? A straight? That part I don’t remember, but I do recall how my dad’s very long arms gave him a huge advantage grabbing those spoons. I also vaguely recall younger kids crying because they couldn’t reach, and that wasn’t fair! Ah, childhood!
Whoever survived and got the most spoons won, as each other player was eliminated. A good lesson for life, circa 2025?
Years later, after I got rid of my dad’s computer, which he was only turning on to play solitaire, he returned to using actual cards, spread out on the kitchen table. My mom was in the nursing home by then, and he had been having me open and print out his emails two or three times a week – all of it either spam or jokes from other old folks – a task which I was no longer willing to do, especially as he didn’t want to spend money to buy more ink for his printer. When my mom died, and then he died three years later, clearing out their house, I found sets of pinochle and regular playing cards in multiple drawers, some encased in fancy boxes or plastic, gorgeously decorated, ready for use. Does anyone play cards anymore? Other than competitive poker? Do kids even play card games these days? Slap jack? War? 52-card pick-up?
When I was fourteen, a terrible, horrible year, my mother and I started playing two-handed pinochle; I don’t know why although I suspect it was an attempt by her to teach me a lesson. I remember I kept beating her and it was unpleasant, but she was distracted, not least by her desire to defeat me soundly enough to take me down a peg or two. The only way that was going to happen was if I let her win (like my dad, I am good at card games), and I was never gonna do that, mostly because she was no dummy – she would know, and that would make her even angrier.
I do remember the last game, though, in the dining room, facing one another across that big wood table that for once was not smothered in green linen, a table cloth she prized as yet another of her siblings had brought it back as a gift for her from Ireland, a.k.a. the ‘mother country’ several generations earlier. I beat her again, and she threw her cards and all others she could grab on the ground, telling me that it was my job to pick them up. Okay, mom. Learning to stay calm, stoic, in the face of her horseshit was a skill that, by then, I had mastered. Only a couple more years and I would be out, and free of her. Or so I thought. Ah, childhood!
“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the mind of the living toward some end or resolution, which it never finds.” – Robert Anderson