Summer Most Heat Moon
Ruth and I played blackjack tonight. I dealt and she still won. Just going into third grade,
her math skills are more than up to the game and her betting showed some uncanny, if randomly lucky, skills, too. She had played some version of the game in school with her teacher, but the real game is a bit harsher, less forgiving. That’s the one I play and the one I taught her.
Cards have been part of my life since I began delivering newspapers. My parents weren’t game players of any sort, so all the card skills I’ve developed came away from home. Starting at age 8, I would gather with ten or fifteen other young boys in a wooden shed where we waited while the old press rumbled through the daily run of the Alexandria Times-Tribune. Sometimes the web would break, the web is a v-shaped piece of metal that folded the newsprint as it came through the press, ready to become a newspaper. This would require much cussing and hurrying on the part of the printers, but it also meant that sometimes our games extended well past the usual half hour or so.
Later, in junior high I began playing poker with a regular group of guys and our game continued through high school. Once in college I veered toward bridge, playing duplicate bridge in a local league and endless hands in an endless game in the student union. After college, the people I knew well, my friends and work colleagues, didn’t play cards, so I set aside that long history.
Only lately, in the past 4 or 5 years, have I picked up regular cards again, playing the five handed version of sheepshead that I report on here occasionally.
Still, I have many hours of card playing behind me and the memory of it has given me an excellent “card sense.” Card sense carries across various sorts of games and refers to an intuitive knowledge of how a hand might develop.
I may not knit or sew, have carpentry skills or fix-it talent, but I can teach my grandchildren how to gamble. An odd realization, but there it is.