On Sunday afternoons, a very elite club meets. It consists of my 94 year old father, my 39 year old mother (dog years), my husband (ageless), and myself (do the math at your own peril).
This club is the Sunday Afternoon “Will Cheat for Chips” Poker Club. Each meeting starts the same way. Daddy tries to explain the rules of poker to Mom and me once again.
And, once again, Mom and I will ignore those rules. After all, we know we have two perfectly good poker hands tacked under our sides of the table to be used whenever things seem too hopeless. Unfortunately those hands are from a different deck and quite obvious due to the cartoon illustrations on them. Daddy tends to ignore this fact for us. David tends to just smile and nod a lot. It’s a talent he’s perfected over 25 years of marriage.
The games usually go something like this.
Mom insists, “This is getting ridiculous. Who dealt this terrible hand?”
I respond, “Let me think. Oh yes, it was you.” I’ve never been known to be a kind child.
Mom ignores me. A talent she’s perfected over 60 some-odd years of motherhood. (Very, very odd years.) “Well, I’ll bet a red chip.”
David looks dubious. “Twenty five dollars on a terrible hand?”
Mom responds quickly. “Don’t worry. You’re not in the will anyway.” For a woman wearing a fake sunflower on her head, she’s pretty quick on those kinds of responses.
As you notice during all of this, Daddy has been very quiet. That’s because he’s the only one at the table who really knows how to play this game. He’s actually studying his hand while we’re arguing over cards, room temperature, and whose turn it is to go get pretzels.
We go through a few rounds of betting, which is a farce since Mom and I just bet color combinations, not actual denominations. We like patriotic hands with red, white, and blue chips. We tend to run out of chips pretty quickly.
Finally, bored with the slow pace of play, we move on to our Dr. Pepper round of play. This is where 10’s, 2’s, and 4’s are all wild cards.
You’ve never lived until you’ve seen a poker game where four hands are laid down and are: five aces, a royal flush, five more aces, and six kings. (Mom sometimes refuses to give up all her cards when she draws new ones. She feels it is a communist plot if she has to give up a king.)
Yes, we’ve realized at the end of our game that we’ve solved no world problems. We’ve not decided what color we’re going to paint the living room, which was our first discussion of the day. We haven’t even decided who will get up to go get the pretzels.
And that’s my definition of a really good day.