THE CARD PLAYER
When I think of my grandfather, I think of cards.
Oh, there were other things he did, of course. He worked at one bank for most of his life. He followed certain sports teams with taciturn fanaticism. He did the Daily News crossword puzzles in ink. He made up nicknames for all of his grandsons (his granddaughters were the light of his life and we didn't get nicknames). But when I visualize my grandfather, I see him with a deck of cards in hand, or maybe two decks.
He started us kids on the simple games: Crazy 8's, for instance, which requires very little skill and is mostly luck. We loved that because we got to dump on each other (when I was growing up, any game that involved the potential for bloodshed was a big hit; Sorry and Parcheesi, because we could send each other back to the beginning of the game, were favorites, for instance).
When we got a little older, he taught us Hearts. We learned the concept of tricks, and we schemed and counted cards and gleefully dumped the Queen of Spades (worth 13 points and feared by all players) on the most deserving player. Grandpop never lost at Hearts. Then he taught us Blitz, which allowed one player to make everybody else in the game lose. Oh, how we loved Blitz! We still play it as adults, and I've taught it myself to kids as young as 9 (as soon as you can add up to 31, you can learn to play that game).
But these were nothing compared to the real games, the games involving trump. He started us on a game called Oh <expletive>, which, when we were kids, we called Oh, Bleep, and which we sometimes, as adults, call Oh Shit. Grandpop taught us the concept of trump (we took to that like fish to water; the idea of something above and beyond the normal order of the world, that could take things that were clearly more powerful than it, was a wonderful concept to kids), and we learned how to guess how many tricks we'd take with a given hand. We also learned, very quickly, how to sabotage each other, how one person could deliberately set out to be a spoiler and ruin everybody else's chances. I'm not saying Grandpop taught us how to do that; I suspect we always had the potential. I'm sure, though, that he approved our instincts for the jugular. He would play Oh Bleep with us, and I'm sure he thought, "These are definitely my grandchildren."
Then we were ready for Pinochle, a level above Oh, Bleep because you not only had tricks, and trump, but you got to bid for the right to choose the trump and you had partners, who could help you or bring you down to destruction. The heroic and not so heroic games of Pinochle that filled my growing up years! We still talk about them, my brothers and sister and I: the time Mike bid to 400 on a double pinochle (worth 300 points), and then couldn't take a trick, so he lost the whole 400 points for himself and his partner (who was probably Joe; they were often partners), or the time Dad and Joe were partners and Mike and Grandpop were partners, and Mike and Grandpop were bidding against each other, with Dad occasionally throwing a bid in between, just to keep them going (Grandpop would sometimes drop out early in the bidding, but once he started bidding, there was no way he would let anyone else outbid him; unfortunately, my brother Mike was the same way). My mother, who had of course learned pinochle at her father's knee, refused to play pinochle with us because she said we played for blood. That never bothered my grandfather, of course; where did we learn it from?
Grandpop didn't just play cards with the kids, of course. There were games he especially enjoyed playing with the adults, my parents and my grandmother, usually. Whenever they would get together, my grandparents and my parents would soon be playing Canasta, another partners game. I was pretty young when I started positioning myself at the Canasta table, between my grandmother's seat and my father's, watching the adults. Each person had his or her specified seat; Grandpop took his seat at the head of the table by right. They always had the same partners, too: the men against the women. That was unfortunate and not entirely fair, because Grandma, though a lovable person, was not a card player. How she remained married to my grandfather for more than fifty years is a mystery, considering his passion for cards; she must have really loved him to put up with it. She couldn't pay attention to the game; she would give the pile to my father all the time without meaning to, or she would throw away vital cards that she and my mother needed. I can still see my grandmother, realizing another of her mistakes, turning to my mother and saying, "I'm sorry, Aileen," and my mother, putting on a weak smile, saying, "Oh, that's all right, Mom," and I could tell, even as a child, that my mother wanted to scream (we didn't get out competitiveness in cards from thin air, after all). The men always won, usually by a lot. Grandpop didn't brag; he took it for granted that he would win, and whenever he did, that just demonstrated the rightness of the universe.
He would play gin rummy with my father, just the two of them. We would go to my grandparents' house, a half hour drive from our home, and at the end of the night, Grandpop and Dad would be playing gin, while we kids waited to go home. And sometimes we would wait a long time, too, because Grandpop wouldn't let Dad leave unless Grandpop was winning. Grandpop was lucky at cards, and often the game wouldn't last too long, but occasionally Dad had a series of hot hands. Then Mom would say something about getting ready to go, which would fall on deaf ears. And Grandma would say, "Bill, the children are exhausted," to which Grandpop would reply, "In a minute." We all knew what that meant.
Grandpop died almost twenty years ago. The other night I was playing pinochle with my sister, her boyfriend, and my 14-year-old daughter. Bids were taken, and won and lost; the game was hard fought to the very last hand. I could have sworn I felt the presence of Grandpop, watching us, shaking his head at the stupid plays, grinning at his great-granddaughter, who had the best luck of the night. I'm sure he was saying to himself, "That's definitely one of mine." When we finished the game, I thought of Grandpop. I could see him, almost. He was shuffling the cards for the next game.