Skip to main content

Pinochle


Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Spades. Those are the cards that form the combination known as a "pinochle" in the game of the same name. When I was little, I'm sure the first card game I learned was either "Go Fish" or "Old Maid" (I remember the Old Maid cards from my paternal grandparents' Florida house). Not long after, I progressed to "War," "Crazy Eights." I played those with my parents, often to pass the time on airplanes, back when the airlines still had decks of cards to distribute free of charge (along with "wings" pins; now you're lucky if they'll give you peanuts and a half can of soda with your outrageously priced economy ticket). There were various forms of solitaire, regular and clock. Eventually the repertoire included "Spit," a fast-slapping game that I'm pretty sure I learned at camp while bunking with a bunch of other pre-teens. We also played some version of poker there, assigning a range of values to different colored M&M candies instead of using game chips or coins. But ultimately, pinochle became my preference and near addiction at one time. It's a little weird, considering that my mom is the one who taught me, and she was from Michigan, and as anyone from Michigan knows, Euchre is the game to play. But I've never played Euchre, only lots and lots of pinochle. When my mom taught the game to me, we were living in Miami. Rather, my parents were shuttling back and forth between New York City and Miami, while Pan Am was still in existence and its Passenger Services division was based in Florida (Dad was needed both there and at global headquarters in NYC). I was already spending most of the year away at a performing/visual arts boarding school, so the first pinochle lesson must've been while I was on vacation. I don't remember how old I was, but it had to have been during the first couple years of high school. I remember these things: It was hard to hold so many cards in my hand (the game is played with a thick deck of 64 cards, not the usual 52, and at some point you've got half of them in your hand at once, if you're playing with only two people). I was having trouble remembering the peculiar order of value, from high to low: A-10-K-Q-J-9-8-7. Why is a ten higher than a king? I still don't get it. I couldn't help thinking of prostitutes every time someone "turned a trick" in the game. In the beginning, I lost every game, many times over, and I became obsessed with the goal of finally beating my mom in a hand. We both hated the heat and humidity, so we played a lot in the summer months, cooped up with the air conditioner on, sitting at the dining room table (the chairs sported a pattern that I am not even going to try to explain, but that came to be visual shorthand in my mind for two things: Florida pastel decor and pinochle). We played very late into the night, or the early hours of the morning. I think that the first time I stayed up past midnight with my mother was during one of these "c'mon, one more game" sessions. Eventually, once I figured out how to count cards, I managed to beat her, and the gratification was immense. We played a lot during certain periods, then later, once I was out of college, we would go for years maybe without a game. We still love to play, though. It's good time spent together, we can play and often the playing leads to talking, the talking to serious talks, deep exchanges, cards momentarily abandoned. We pulled my father into the game at one point, too, so now it's a family game (one I look forward to teaching my son someday). The final memory: my dad, never playing as frequently, looking puzzled at his hand and about to ask the question my mom and I both anticipate and answer for him before he asks it. Jack of Diamond, Queen of Spades. It's worth forty points.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
7 comments
Read more

Black Kids Read, Too

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Touch Typing

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...
3 comments
Read more