"With a Conscience" - "My house of cards "

                                                    My house of cards                     

                              "Cards are war, in disguise of a sport." - Charles Lamb


I don't remember exactly what age I was when my mother took out a deck of playing cards and taught me how to play the game "Gin Rummy."  But what I do remember was that playing cards with my mother was always exciting, if not gut-wrenching.  I may have been the apple of my family's eye but when it game to cards, all of us were on an equal footing.  You played by the rules or you lost.  A clear, very simple lesson for someone at the age of six or seven.

"I'll shuffle the cards and deal the hand," my mother would say emphatically.  I would watch her skillfully shuffle the cards, and deal our hands. The game began.  It was war.  Mom was always, ALWAYS a fierce competitor.  There were rules.  You followed them or you forfeited points.  If you lost, and in the beginning I almost always did, you weren't allowed to quit.  You were challenged to play again and again until well, you won a game.  "That's not fair! You won again Mom," I would cry.  "Yes, yes I did," she'd reply with no guilt. I didn't realize it at the time but she was teaching me that winning takes time.  You had to learn the rules of the game before you could figure out how to win. How I wish it hadn't taken so long to realize the value of that lesson.

We graduated from "Gin Rummy" to the game of "Hearts" to the biggest card game challenge of all..."Canasta."  "Canasta" requires four decks of cards and it has a graduated level of collecting different groups of cards before you can actually win.  From the moment all of us learned "Canasta" there were late, late hours of card playing, laughing, yelling, howling, the throwing of cards.  War.  There were nights where it was all out war. My father, sisters, boyfriends who would become husbands, cousins, aunts would place themselves around our kitchen table and prepare to do battle.  Take no prisoners, we all thought.  Beyond the card games, we talked.  We talked and talked and talked.  We discussed anything that was important in our lives.  We debated, we argued and most of all, we laughed.  Boy oh boy, did we laugh.

After my father passed, the card playing stopped.  Why I'm not sure.  I guess all of us realized that we needed to proceed with the next stages of our life.  And we did.  But the card playing stopped and none of us seemed to even notice how important those days at the kitchen table were.  The loss of a parent tends to promote important changes and so, Mom, my sisters and I progressed.

And then, last week as if by some divine intuition, my sister, my nephew and I sat down with our Mom to play "Canasta" once again.  Mom,  " The Queen of Canasta," had no recollection of having ever played the game.  We sat down and commenced to rehash the directions of the game.  Not just for her but for us.  We had forgotten how to play the game too! But within 20 minutes, the cards had been dealt and we were back on the field of battle.  The banter, the fierce competition came back to all of us. All of sudden, we were following the rules and then learning how to use strategies that went beyond the rules.  

Mom won.  She didn't remember ever playing with any of us but she won.  She won outright. I looked at her in shock because she didn't really comprehend how she won. But she won. I looked at her and for a moment saw the woman who took the time to sit down with me and teach me the lessons of winning and losing with a deck of cards. I saw the person who had focused all of her energies on raising her children and keeping our world in order.  

Shockingly, I've been told, many young people today are not familiar with a deck of cards.  How unfortunate for them.  If I could, I would make it a mandate that every family own a deck of cards and play those aces, kings, queens, and jacks and manipulate those deuces wild and use the rules of cards to learn the lessons of life.  Everyone should own a deck of cards.