This election has poisoned a lot of my vocabulary. “Tremendous” and “huge” are both suspect, unless I am intentionally evoking the ghost of the toupeed pumpkinhead, and why would I want to do that. Back in 2008 I lost “you bet” and “you betcha” to Sarah Palin. Those were less painful losses, as I’ve mostly moved away from the Northern Midwest where my accent picked them up.
But now I can’t use the word “trump”, even in a card game, without cringing inwardly. Pinochle and hearts and sheepshead and euchre and even Five Crowns are dear to my competitive little heart, and the word “trump” is rather important to all those games.
Basically, if it’s a card game with trick-taking and trump cards, I’m likely to love it. (Except I never got the hang of bridge. Mostly because I stopped hanging out with the person I started to take bridge lessons with, and the only other person I knew who played was my grandmother, who had dementia by then and could no longer play.)
Pinochle was the family game. Both my dad’s family and my mom’s, even though they were from completely different backgrounds and locations. So of course they taught me and my sister to play from the age of eight or so. It was a big deal when we were both good enough at it that we could partner each other and hold our own against our parents. It’s still the default activity whenever I’m around my parents or aunts, although neither Rosa nor her cousins play, nor did most of mine ever learn, because my aunts didn’t marry men who played or were willing to learn.
Back when I was still married to Ray, we tried teaching him. He learned, sort of, but was a very bad loser, and quickly began to refuse to play. He will still occasionally trot out “I once maimed a man playing pinochle” if the topic happens to come up. He is one of those people who, having once found a phrase or saying funny, will repeat it endlessly until you are ready to strangle him to make it stop.
In high school, I taught a group of my friends to play pinochle, and we used to play every day over lunch. But I lived in Wisconsin, where the trick-taking game of choice is sheepshead, so of course I wanted to learn to play. I can’t tell you how many times I was told it was impossible to learn unless you’d grown up with it. My parents, having come from elsewhere and moved to Wisconsin as adults, didn’t play. Presumably their friends also refused to teach them. In any case, eventually I convinced someone to teach me, and played it for several years on church retreats and such, until I moved out of the state and no longer had anyone to play with.
I fetched up in Indiana, where the local game was euchre. And people were willing to teach it, even. Again, played for several years, and then moved out of state.
Now I’m lucky if I get to play cards once every six months or so, for no particularly good reason except lack of convenient flat surface to play on. Tammie knows pinochle, but there are only two of us and it’s really not that great as a two-person game. Though I did meet someone over the weekend who knows the game. Hmmm.
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