You know you are born into a game playing family when you learn to count Ace, Two, Three.... Jack, Queen, King. We started out playing concentration and go fish, and moved on to Crazy Eights, War, Euchre and Gin Rummy and as we got older as well, we started learning about gambling - 31 turned into 21 turned into Blackjack, and Poker.
But cards alone were not our vice, we integrated them into knock down drag out matches of Cribbage on Grandma's special map of Prince Edward Island cribbage board which was hung in a place of honour over the master bedroom door at the cottage, and into Rumoli where pennies flew!
All of this though was covert training for the real game...
BRIDGE
Bridge is an institution in our family and one of the rites of passage into adulthood was to be asked to sit and play the hand out while one of the four adults playing needed to make a pitstop... and then being asked to stay on to bid, well that was just the biggest honour!
Bridge, once you learn it is a fairly straightforward game after bidding has taken place, but until that point you are trying to communicate in a foreign language of cards, suits, high card points, voids, singletons, doubletons, and tricks... and one doesn't really mean one, it means seven...
Once the first bid is made, the language gets more complex as you decode the message and supply a return message, interrupted by your opponents message to their partner... you're bidding on Trump, or No Trump, how many cards you can take in your suit and of course your opponents are working to their advantage too, often trying to one up you, fortunately there was always an out - PASS!
Bridge was played so often that when my cousin Stephanie was little, she wanted so badly to learn to play 'PASS'
My grandfather was one of those fly by the seat of his pants bidders - he'd look at his cards, size up his partner and open with some outrageous bid, forcing the rest of the table to pass and then making his contract exactly. The rest of us cobbled together our knowledge, tried to get by and decode what our partner wanted us to say and hoped - kitchen table bridge at its best.
When I was in high school I met several other friends who played cards and spent hours after school in an empty classroom playing everything from Euchre to Canasta to Gin Rummy. We got caught there by the janitor who was closing the school down and word spread the next day to one of our guidance counselors, who taught bridge to adults on the side... he legitimized our 'club' and set about teaching everyone bridge - I knew the basics from playing with my family - but I had no idea what was in store for me when we started playing duplicate bridge (a tournament style where all the hands are preset and you rotate through multiple tables so everyone plays all the hands) and I added strange new words to my vocabulary - Forcing, Blackwood, Staymen, Jacoby, Transfers... my head swam! We played in preparation for a huge bridge tournament and everyone started to get pretty good, or so we thought...
Imagine, a room with 240 card tables set up in groups of eight tables, each with four chairs and a set of cards in special duplicate bridge holders - 950 adults and ten high schoolers out for their first time... you had to play quickly, deliberately and technically - it wasn't grandpa's kitchen table any more...
And to be honest, it wasn't nearly as much fun - it was WORK!
I came away from that experience with 1/4 masters point and the knowledge that I wanted games to be games... so I never played in another tournament again... but I still play bridge every chance I get... PASS
