Pinochle

Pinochle was--is still--the main method of bonding in my family. When any group of my relatives gets together, the cards come out. Conversation happens over the card table. Conversation, and good-natured raillery. Everyone's style of play is so well known to everyone else that it itself becomes the subject of banter. And there are many memories that attach to the game.

"We didn't bring you up to be..." Dad started to say.

"A ribbon clerk, I know."

"That was your grandfather's saying."

"Yes...It's been an awfully long time since I've heard him say it, though." Grandpa died in 1980, when I was twelve. I still miss him occasionally. I think he was my favorite grandparent.

I've been playing since I was about eight years old, and it's second nature to me now. I noticed the other night, while playing with my parents, that I was counting trump without ever having thought about it. Even though I no longer play more often than once every six months or once a year, it's like riding the proverbial bicycle. The reactions are almost instinctive.

We're not generous with each other either. Every single point is subject to competition. There's little room for shrugging off of errors, especially when they cost someone else a point or two. I missed some meld during one hand, and noticed it two tricks into the trick-taking.

"Oh rats, I missed my eighty kings."

"Too late." And no amount of protestation was going to get me those points, either. I knew it, but still protested all the same.

I wonder...I think I lost some respect for Ray years ago when he couldn't stand up to the family game. We tried to teach him how to play, and he grasped the rules readily enough, but when one time he was partnered with my dad, and made a mistake for which Dad castigated him, he refused to ever play again. "I maimed a man playing pinochle," he used to say whenever he was invited to join in a game. (And anything Ray "used to say" he said very regularly. Over and over until my ears were ready to fall off from hearing it.)

A few more answers

jillfelice -- Absolutely, it gets me petted!
very -- That's a really hard question for me because I don't listen to all that much music. My standard answer has been Robynn Ragland's "People You Know", but it doesn't feel right just at the moment. Maybe The Call, "I Still Believe".
neeuqdrazil -- Yes, but I guess it doesn't make all that much difference most of the time. Just knowing it's there is a bit of a thrill, and it's definitely fun to play with, but I think I need more datapoints. ;-) (No, that was not too personal a question. You're allowed.)

Ask me more questions!

Note to my friends with similar polls: I have questions in mind for some of you, but it'll take me a day or two to get to them all. I was away from LJ pretty much all weekend due to the parental visit.

Instant poem

I lie warm and asleep
Entangled in surreal dreams
A call from the office
Coerces me from my bed
My body tingles with
The kiss of autumn's first frost

City Museum

I remember the other thing I wanted to post about from this weekend. Saturday my parents and I took Rosa to St. Louis's City Museum. Their slogan is "Unlike any museum you've seen," and it's true. I've been to museums all over the world, children's museums, art museums, history museums...There is nothing else like it. I've been there before, but I had forgotten how absolutely indescribably cool it is. I'll try to describe it anyway.

The best way I can describe the City Museum is as a giant art installation that you can play in. The whole first floor and mezzanine are given over to tunnels and caves and treehouses to climb over and under, slide down, or slither through. You can spend time in the belly of a whale, or the nest of a giant imaginary bird. The second floor contains studio space for various artists, whom you can watch as they work, and the third floor has museum-type exhibits.

That is, if the museum in question is a museum of the surreal. Okay, there's an architecture exhibit hall that is fairly museum-standard, except for the fact that many of the exhibits are just piled on shelves in random order and unlabeled, and there's an exhibit hall of changing exhibitions which is currently displaying "American Celtic" paintings, and once had an exhibit of dinosaur fossils from the Soviet Union. Then there is a functioning model train (1/8 scale) which carries small children around in circles. And there is also the "Museum of Mirth, Mayhem and Mystery", which displays various esoterica of the quasi-occult like fortunetelling machines, an alien baby Elvis in a coffin, an aluminum Pegasus...all in an environment reminiscent of a 1950's diner. There is the "Everyday Circus", which does hourly shows using audience participation and jokey stunts.

And outdoors...oh my gods. An all-new "Humongous Human Habitrail" (text from their own website) called MonstroCity. Rosa and I climbed through almost the whole thing. It's a bit like the indoor first floor, only on a scale that adults can much more readily climb in. It rises three stories in the air, with wire tubes, tunnels, and catwalks. Two relic airplanes. A fire truck. A castle. A crane. A touring tram. All connected by loops of heavy wire or I-beams or catwalks for climbing. Not for the acrophobic. Oddly enough, although I am afraid of ladders, I'm not afraid of heights. It's whether or not things wiggle while I'm standing on them. Everything in MonstroCity was very stable.

Answers, next batch

quinnclub -- Yes, it was. Much less stressful. There were still some sticky bits but on the whole it was peaceful and happy.

jillfelice -- "Silver or steel?"