As a child, my mother taught me, sometimes enlisting my siblings’ help, how to play Candyland and Old Maid. I didn’t play Go Fish or Crazy Eights, though I remember having cards for them. When I was a little older, my siblings taught me how to play Clue and Concentration, and sometimes one or both parents sat in with us. I’m sure I rarely, if ever, won. I had zero interest in Monopoly and never played it. Occasionally, we played Scrabble; a game played with voracious readers who have good vocabularies is an awesome thing, and that game has always been a favorite of mine to play one-on-one, which is why I still keep several different games going online with Tom and three friends.
My father taught me how to play my first “gown-up” card game, Rummy. He probably deliberately lost to me many times so the feeling of winning would keep me engaged. My sister later taught me how to play every version of Spades I’ve played, including going nil. Spades is one of the games I like best, but it also causes me stress when I have a partner depending on me. It’s a love/stress game.
As young adults, Debby and I learned Parcheesi and had the most competitive games of it imaginable with her first husband/children’s father and my boyfriend who became my first husband. Many years later, we played it with other people and the tameness of it made us bewildered by how those games in our memories were so fiercely played.
Some of my other games as an adult were Cribbage (my brother David taught me); Boggle, which I learned with Lynne and her sister Liz and won a lot, only to be consistently trounced by our friend Steve V many years later in games with him, James, and Tom at Toopee’s, a now-closed lesbian coffee place/restaurant we liked. I’m still not over the shock of my Boggle losses, and that was the mid-1990s.
Lynne and Liz also taught me Yahtzee, and no game-playing ever made me laugh so much, both with them and, later, with my sister, her friends Connie and Dottie, and Tom. We once taught Aaron to play Yahtzee when he was tired, almost falling asleep over the game. He persisted, but I suspect it was his version of Gitmo and he chose never to play it again–at least with us. May have had something to do with our Full Sheet Yahtzee, which involves playing five games at once.
In the early to late ’80s, it was all Trivial Pursuit all the time, and I kicked butt at the original and the Baby Boomer editions. I’m pretty sure if I played that now, I wouldn’t remember shit. =) If Bad Boyfriend No. TWO and I played as partners, we were unbeatable. Life Lesson: Knowing a crap-ton of trivial information does not ensure a successful relationship. But the game was fun.
Also in the late ’80s, Aunt Audrey taught us Progressive Rummy (I used some of that in Three Fortunes), and it may be this game that brings out the most intensely competitive part of my personality. Through the years, we have lured others into the game, and I’ve lost many times. Sometimes I’m even gracious about it, but I’m always out there lurking, waiting for a chance to avenge myself.
From the late ’80s into the ’90s, with Tom’s family, as with Lynne and Craig’s, I’ve laughed hard over Pictionary and Uno. (Uno has the tendency to turn into the remembered viciousness of Parcheesi, and that may be universal; I’ve read about many Uno matches on social media in which empires have fallen and families split up forever.) With Lynne and Craig’s whole crew, when we delayed Progressive Rummy so we could play other games with the kids in the afternoon and early evenings, we also played Scattergories, and when Jess was younger, a game called Guess Who?
With my undergraduate friends, we played a lot of Spoons (this game can get physical!) and Scrabble, and it was my college roommate Debbie who taught me the real point of this post, Backgammon. I loved Backgammon so much that I taught Lynne, and later Tim, to play. Backgammon is another one in which I’m highly competitive, but in this case, I’m not cutthroat. Tim became a far more ferociously skilled player than I am, and as he and Jim play with the same intensity, I happily sit back and watch their death-matches when Jim visits (not for nothing was it Jim who taught us a fun card game called Spite and Malice).
Tuesday, when I was writing, suddenly a little gift from my past appeared without any planning. And it looks like this, tucked into its 9.5×7-ish-inch case.
Under its fabric, the board is metal, and the game pieces are magnets because it’s a travel version of Backgammon. Nothing slides around, except the dice, which are meant to roll. It’s still owned by Lynne since late ’70s/early ’80s, and both of these photos are courtesy of her. You can’t imagine how many nights we sat on the floor in front of her fireplace back in Alabama, and played on this board. Later, after both of us were divorced and sharing a house, we played at the dining room table; at the pub we went to; and on breaks at the restaurant where we both worked, she as a cook and manager; me part-time as hostess/waitress. I also had a full-time teaching job and a teaching job at a business school two nights a week, where Lynne was a student; we were busy women, and Backgammon was a quiet way to relax.
Or it should have been. It’s a Pandora’s box of memories, one of them involving Bad Boyfriend No. ONE. He, too, worked at the restaurant, had another part-time job, and was a full-time college student. He, too, played Backgammon, and his was a game of strategy. Lynne has her own strategy, and he hated to lose to her because he said she played by LUCK and that was WRONG, and one night, he got so angry when he lost that he picked up the entire set and threw it out the front door. I don’t know if Lynne and I went out together and retrieved the pieces, or if I stayed inside, but I think Lynne and I both thought, He’s as overtired as we are. He’ll get over it. No big deal.
It was a big deal. A warning sign, one I didn’t recognize. I’d be sorry for that later, but I can’t change the past. Or… I can. Because when this specific Backgammon game unexpectedly slipped into my writing yesterday, it did so with sweetness. It’s a small, gentle way to take an awful piece of the past and turn it into a moment celebrating friendship and love. As hard as some experiences are, all those other times of my life with family and friends are really what matters on this side of my decades lived.
My characters are based on everyone and no one, and they are always my teachers.
