Let's Play Cards!

Author: Tracy Crump

When I was growing up, we didn’t have satellite television with 850 channels, Nintendo 360, or multimedia-online-role-playing games. All we had was a black and white television set with three stations, a few board games, and a deck of cards.

On a typical day, my two sisters and I would sit in a circle on the living room floor and play cards. One day stands out the most in my mind. It went something like this…

“Hey, there’s one missing,” I said as I began to count the cards.

“Oh, you think you’re so smart,” sneered Shelly, my middle sister. “Just because you’re the oldest and you’ve played longer than we have, you think you can tell if there’s a card missing just by holding the deck.”

“Forty-nine…fifty…fifty-one. Seeee!” I exclaimed triumphantly, as we scrambled to find the missing card.

“Let’s play Concentration,” suggested Shelly.

“I want to play Go Fish,” whined Laury.

“You always get to choose! Just because you’re the baby,” complained Shelly.

“Mo-om!” they both called in unison.

“You girls agree on a game or find something else to do,” our mother decreed, refusing to be drawn into our petty squabble and wisely surmising that we would learn more by being allowed to work things out on our own.

“We’ll take turns and play Go Fish first, then Concentration,” I negotiated, dealing the cards.

“Then we’ll play my favorite, 500 Rummy.”

Hours later, after having played our twenty-third game of Crazy Eights…

“You cheated!” Laury shouted, getting up and stomping out of the room.

“Did not!” retorted Shelly, retreating to her own corner.

But it didn’t last long and they were back with hugs in no time. After all, we still had a few valuable hours left in the day to devote to playing cards.

Maybe there were more productive things we could have done with our time, but we managed to learn a thing or two from those simple card games. Things like:

Adding up scores improved our math skills,
Shuffling increased our manual dexterity,
Our memory enhanced as we turned up two cards to see if they matched, then tried to remember where they were located on our next turn,
But most of all, we learned about cooperation and forgiveness, traits that have followed us into our adult years.

In my own family, we passed along the tradition of playing cards to our two sons. While the games sometimes took on new faces, such as Uno, Skipbo, and Milles Bournes, we still enjoyed the old pastimes.

In addition to the camaraderie of playing a game of cards together, we talked about our week and shared experiences playing with our families growing up. Like the time my husband, Stan, told the boys, “Games of Canasta with Granddaddy Simmons would get pretty competitive. He would figure out that I was saving queens and freeze the deck until he could go out. I got so mad, but it made me a better player.”

Our card-playing wasn’t confined to home, either. Cards traveled with us on vacation, to the beach, and even the mountains. For years, I carried a plain deck of cards in my purse in case we ever found ourselves stuck somewhere and in need of amusement. More than once, they proved to be a lifesaver.

With us, card games were a chance to slow down and connect in a fast-paced, hurry-up-and-be-somewhere world. Unlike watching television and playing video games, cards allowed us to interact while we played, a novelty in today’s culture.

Just recently our oldest son, now twenty-four and attending graduate school in a city seven hours away, came home for an extended visit over the Christmas holidays. “Hey, Mom!” he called, as he dug out a deck of cards and removed the rubber band. “Let’s play cards.”

“Of course!”