Another Day in the Country
The games of life
© Another Day in the Country
It’s a lucky day when Kristina calls and says, “Watcha doin’?” and then follows up my answer with, “we’d like to come over and play games for an hour or so before Madeline goes to volleyball practice.”
She knows that I enjoy playing games. Maybe she also knows it isn’t just about games. Sitting around a table, playing games, we learn all kinds of things about each other.
All kinds of topics come up. You can hear the latest news about more distant family members. Some pretty heavy subjects surface — inadvertently at times — while a nonsense game like Exploding Kittens is spread across the table.
My mother loved playing dominoes, and she was good at it. She wasn’t particularly excited about playing Mexican Train but she loved what we called the old-fashioned way of playing, where you tried to make points by lining up your end numbers to be divisible by five.
“That’s way too much work,” my sister complains if we suggest playing that game with her.
Fifty-plus years ago, my daughter’s dad and I made an oversized (3½-x-6½-inch) set of double-nine dominoes out of redwood and laboriously drilled 497 shallow indents (if I counted correctly) that I carefully filled with white paint.
We had time on our hands, waiting impatiently for our daughter, Jana, to be born, and she was late in arriving.
Once Jana arrived, we were busier, and those big dominoes were used infrequently. But I couldn’t throw them away no matter how bulky they were, using way too much room on a shelf that held games.
Yes, I brought those dominoes to Ramona. This summer, her 18-year-old son and I played several intense domino games with scores divisible by five on the living room floor.
It just happened that it was the evening before his mother’s birthday. We’d been straightening shelves in the garage.
“What are these?” he wanted to know, blowing dust off the top of the box of oversized dominoes.
I told him the story.
My current, favorite, game is called Wingspan, and I must admit that when we unwrapped it from under the Christmas tree, my head spun, and my heart sank.
The minute the lid came off the box, I knew this was a seriously complicated game. We watched YouTube tutorials, keeping the rules handy on the table at all times, and finally muddled our way through the first game, declaring a winner.
“That was intense,” someone muttered.
“But it was fun, wasn’t it?” someone else said.
At that stage, we wondered, but we tried again, and now we are hooked.
That game flew to California for Christmas vacation and then flew back to Kansas with me after Dagfinnr’s high school graduation in June.
“We have more time to play games at your house,” my daughter said.
She was right.
The latest game that my “bonus grandkids” taught me is called 31. I’m sure the kids love that game because we play it with quarters — three per person, which means anyone can make $4.50 by winning the game.
We keep a roll of quarters in the china cupboard just in case they come by.
At the beginning of the new year, I threw out all my old decks of cards. They were dirty, tattered, and used up.
Out with the old, in with the new! I came home with eight decks of brand-new cards in four different colors. Let the games begin!
When we moved back to Ramona, Aunt Gertie and Uncle Hank still were here. They were great game players, and we spent many an evening playing 10-point pitch. We called it the Ramona Game.
Then we learned to play Hand and Foot, and that became our favorite game. It’s a complicated game to learn, so we made up “rule cards” and had them laminated to hand out to novices.
On a visit to our Colorado cousins, we heard about a game called Jokers and Pegs, learned to play it, and liked it so much that we ordered our own set.
It became our favorite family game of all time. We even manage to play it on FaceTime every other Sunday afternoon with Jana and Dagfinnr, calling out our moves between exchanging the news of California and Kansas. We play as partners, which is more fun and makes the game go faster.
If you, too, like playing games, you know it isn’t about winning — although winning is fun. It’s about the conversation that takes place while the game is going on.
It’s about a group of people sitting around a table laughing, eating popcorn, and just enjoying each other’s company on another day in the country.