by Mary Hrovat
The other day, one of my grandsons asked me if I’d like to play Mario Kart with him. It goes against my grain to turn down invitations from my grandsons. However, when we’d played Mario Kart a few weeks earlier, I’d been terrible at it. His younger brother, watching from the sidelines, wanted to know why I played so badly. I said it was because the game was new to me, but in fact I’ve always been slow and clumsy at games that require quick reactions and hand-eye coordination, back to Pac-Man and even earlier. As an undergrad I was good at an arcade version of Trivial Pursuit, but that cuts no ice with anyone these days.
So I asked if we could play another game instead. My grandson wasn’t interested in any of the games I suggested; I suspect he was still hoping for a video game. Then one of his parents proposed that we play euchre. My daughter-in-law started setting up the card table; my son went for a deck of cards. My grandson and I teamed up to play the two of them. My younger grandson, who had shown me his rock museum and drawings from a nature journal earlier, washed his hands of card games and went to play outside.
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My son walked us through a sample round. Card games often mystify me, and some twenty-five years earlier my sons had tried to teach me euchre, without success. I’d thought that absolutely nothing about the game had stuck with me, beyond the fact that you use only some of the cards (the 9 to the ace of each suit). However, it looked more familiar than I expected. And somewhere between my late 30s and my early 60s, I’d become more relaxed about arbitrary rules (in part because I’d learned a lot about ignoring the unimportant ones). I could accept with equanimity the statement that the jack of spades can, in some situations, be considered a club. I understood the use of the words leading and following. I started to get the point.
At the end of the sample round, my son showed us how each pair of players keeps score using two of the unused playing cards, a four and a six. You win by scoring 10 points. When you get to 9 points, you’re said to be in the barn; arrival in the barn is accompanied in these parts by a goofy ritual. My son demonstrated: he tucked a score card above each ear, interlaced his fingers, and turned his hands to us, palms out, thumbs down. He said that his partner would then pull on his thumbs to imitate milking, and he would moo. “You moo because cows moo when they’re milked,” he explained to his skeptical son. “I forgot that part,” I said.
∞
In the early rounds, my grandson and I had a bit of beginner’s luck, and I was pleased to feel that I was holding up my end of the effort to introduce him to euchre. He, by contrast, became increasingly restless as he realized how long the game was going to take. He informed us that there were other things he might be doing with his limited free time.
I said, by way of encouragement, “When you’re in high school and all the other kids are playing euchre, you’ll know how.”
His mother said, “Someday you’ll be 42, and evenings like this will be some of your happiest memories.”
His father said, “You and Grandma are up six points to two; I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
Eventually my son and daughter-in-law caught up with us, and my grandson perked up a bit when the score became tied at 8. For one thing, he was still eyeing the clock, and we were getting closer to the end. He was also looking forward to the cow thing. As partners, he and I discussed what we’d do if we reached the barn: did he want to be the cow or the milker? We settled that (he would be the cow) and moved into another round.
As it turned out, it was the last round of the game. We scored two points and won without ever entering the barn. I congratulated him on his playing and said that maybe we’d get to do the moo thing next time. I think in the end he enjoyed the game at least a bit. It was a sweet evening; I hope we play again.
∞
It was funny how many memories had come to mind when I watched my daughter-in-law setting up the card table. I remembered my father’s card table—why was it my father’s rather than the family’s? I don’t know, but that’s how I remember it. (I have so many questions about the past.) He worked at that table sometimes, but it was also the site of many games.
I remember in particular that my parents and my oldest brother and I sometimes played gin rummy at that table. I was about my grandson’s age and pleased to be doing a grownup thing; I think my parents might even have let me keep score. I still remember the cards we used; the design on the back of them showed a stylized map of Florida against blue-green water. I don’t know where that deck came from; my parents never visited Florida.
I also don’t know where they went, those cards, or whatever happened to the table itself. Does anyone else ever think about where the things of their childhood homes went? My mother’s nested plastic mixing bowls, each a different color, probably went the way of most plastic of that era; they were scratched and a little grimy even by the time I was a teenager. But what about her cooking pots, which seemed indestructible? I also wonder about my grandmother’s green china coffee mug, and my parents’ record albums. I’ve thought wistfully about their typewriter, a gray Royal as solid as a car with fins. My mother must have typed thousands of letters on that thing, and I used it to write funny stories about my family and to type a few editions of a family newspaper the summer I was 15. I hope someone is using it and caring for it still.
When I was 42, I was beginning to grasp how thoroughly gone the past is. I picture the tables and chairs and beds of previous homes, the typewriters and telephones, as if they were still part of an existing household, standing in the places where I knew them, amid the people of my earlier years. In fact the things are mostly gone, and the people have moved on, changed if not dead or scattered. I’d be a stranger in those spaces today. As I walked home that evening, I thought about the people I’ll never share a table with again.
The strange thing is how vividly I carry the past with me, gone as it is. It’s still alive, if often asleep, inside me. Forgotten details from decades ago occasionally come to mind as if they were the things of yesterday. I’d like to think of my grandsons as old men recalling family times long after I’m gone, carrying some version of me in the rooms of memory, as I carry past worlds within me.
∞
Image by Jozef Mikulcik from Pixabay
You can see more of my work at MaryHrovat.com.