Sundays with Grandma

Grandma Baker was a card shark. Not the beady-eyed, chain-smoking type. She was the very English, permanent-waved, twin-set and pearls, crocheting variety – a kind of card shuffling Miss Marple. She visited us by bus every other Sunday afternoon and brought with her one, sometimes two, small white paper bags of candy: humbugs, butterscotch or, on a good day, chewing nuts. While my Dad snoozed in his armchair or watched some old black and white war movie and my mother cleared the dishes from lunch and started preparing for dinner, Grandma and I munched on candies and played cards.

She taught me all the games she knew: Rummy, Brag, Beggar my Neighbor, Pontoon, German Whist, Cribbage. We started with the simplest and worked our way up. She had infinite patience while I learned new rules, forgot them again and struggled with holding all my cards in my seven-year-old fingers without literally showing my hand. Occasionally I’d try to cheat, though never successfully. Grandma’s gimlet eyes would never let that kind of thing go by unchecked.

At first I was frustrated, the games were too difficult and I hated to keep losing. Grandma would help me by dropping hints. “Are you sure you want to do that?” when I gave away a two in Rummy, and “Have another look at that,” when I threw out a trump card in Whist. As I improved, though, she was less gracious. She would merely smile furtively and say, “Thank you very much, dear girl,” as she picked up my mistakenly discarded winning card. I would inwardly kick myself and outwardly demand to play something “more fun”, like Monopoly or Mousetrap. But Grandma’s frail frame belied her toughness. She had lived through two world wars; in an industrial Northern English city, she’d seen the Blitz up close. She had taught my mother and her siblings to be resilient and she wanted to pass it on to me. So we played on, or we played nothing.

The standard coming-of-age benchmark in our family was growing as tall as Grandma. At 4’ 11” it didn’t take long. My two older brothers had accomplished that before I was born and my older cousins more recently. As I neared that much sought after prize, my card-playing abilities grew also and I began to win as many games as I lost. The cards flew, the matchstick markers raced around the cribbage board recording our victories, and my father’s peaceful Sunday afternoons were shattered by the cheers of triumph and the groans of defeat. I would wait by the window for Grandma’s arrival, the card table already set up and the cards, cribbage board and snacks ready to go. I would take her coat, make her a cup of tea (in one of the “good china” tea cups, with a saucer) and the games would begin. Breaks were permitted for teatime and duties of nature, but the last game would not come to its resounding close until almost 9 o’ clock, when victor and vanquished would walk to the bus stop arm-in-arm and I would see Grandma safely on her way home.

It’s been almost 20 years since Grandma left us for the great Whist Drive in the sky. I can barely remember how to play most of those games and these days it’s hard to find someone willing to turn off the TV for long enough to run off a couple of rounds of Thirteen Card Brag, even if they did know how. But I need to remember. I need to pass on the resilience to my children and one day, my grandchildren. I need to teach them the valuable lessons that their great-great-grandmother taught me: Sharing knowledge takes the patience and perseverance of both teacher and student, but the rewards for both are limitless; no matter how great you become, you can’t win every game and sometimes you just have to play for fun; and even if you inadvertently lay down your trump card, it doesn’t mean that all is lost and you should just move on to something easier. Oh, yes, and 4’ 11” is tall enough to hang up your own coat and help put dishes away, unless you happen to be 84.