Anybody up for dominoes?
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
When I was a child, dominoes was our family game. For some reason, my mother hated playing cards. For her, cards meant arguments, gambling, and smoke-filled rooms. Her children wouldn't learn to play cards — and we didn't until we were grown-ups coming back to Ramona and Uncle Hank taught us to play the Ramona version of 10-point pitch.
Dominoes, on the other hand, held none of those connotations for our mother. And so we played dominoes at the kitchen table after supper — double nines — the old fashioned way, counting our score as the number on the end of the lines added up to something divisible by five. "This is a good game," my mother would say to us as we added and divided, computed, and recorded. "Look at what you learn."
And to this day, we play dominoes with Mom and Dad when we visit and it's the very same set that they bought back in the early 1940s.
For my old friend, Dr. Shaw, dominoes was a game for old geezers. "My greatest fear," Doc said when he got to that age where he was needing to contemplate retirement centers and assisted living facilities, "is that someday you'll load up my suitcase in the trunk of the car, drop me off at a place like this, and I'll never see you again." "You know I wouldn't do that," I reassured him, "but you get lonely rattling around in that house alone. Wouldn't it be nice to have a little company and some help?" He looked at me with a wry smile, "You'll have me playing dominoes with those old geezers yet, won't you?" Old geezers. Right. Doc, in his 80s, walking with a cane, silver-haired, did not see himself in the geezer category. Geezer-hood was a title bestowed on other old decrepit men — not himself.
When Doc finally closed the door on his own home and took up retirement center living, he, in fact, did become quite the domino player. Night after night, he and his new friends occupied the hours between supper and bedtime playing dominoes — double sixes. I chuckled to myself as I joined their game for the first time, "How much challenge could this be? Double six? Kid's stuff." I soon discovered that several of these players were professionals, who in spite of failing memory and Altzheimers still knew every "money-making" combination in the game, could add scores better than any adding machine, and while they may not remember what they'd had for supper, they definitely knew every domino piece that had not been played.
These days we play dominoes — double twelves — and it's a version called Mexican Train. We play it several times a week. We even have an official record book for keeping score. Whoever wins the most games in any given month has to treat the others to a movie.
So this week when friends were visiting from California, it seemed natural to invite them to join the game. "Is this what small town life is like?" my friend Norman wanted to know as we gathered around the table. "The only thing to do at night is play dominoes?" I pondered small town life for a moment. How is it different? We've become just as busy here as we ever were in California. It's just that we work doing things we love instead of spending long hours working for someone else. However, there's less clutter, less people, less traffic in a small town. Somehow this stillness invites you to connect with nature, your neighbor, or your loved ones. "What do most people do at nine o'clock at night?" I wondered. Probably watch TV and we purposely don't have one in our Ramona house — instead, we play games. And so we sat around the table, this group of friends — some new acquaintances and some old — playing dominoes.
The hum of conversation, punctuated by laughter, became part of the evening air that floated through the house and out the windows. We played, round after round, spinning tales, sharing news, weaving memories late into the night. As midnight approached, I looked at these people I love and thought, "Yes, this is another precious day in the country."
