Family culture

Liquid sunshine is what they call it. Rain. Because it’s warm and muggy and wet. It rained all through the night last night, kept raining during the day, and has kept it up all tonight, too.  We will check to make sure that there is no flooding to keep us from getting to the airport today, an hour and a half drive away from here. We had planned to spend our last day at a park, walking around in sunshine. But instead we have been indoors. What does your family do when you are driven in doors? Ours has theological discussions over card games.

Every culture has its games. Every age. Every family. Cats and dogs and otters and dolphins play games. If you look online, you find educational games for kids, game theory for economists, and most of all, of course, video games. We love games. Apparently they fulfill just about every need out there: practice for real life, rewards for behavior, social interaction, fun, power, opportunities for organizing things and tidying up, character training, development of mental prowess, competition and collaboration, escape, mastery, and as I added in my commentary on football, the suspense of a real-time story.

What games did your family play on rainy days? I remember lots of games. I remember how my dad invented games. He created a game called WAR, and though we played thousands of times, I never could beat him. It was like Stratego but so much better. You set up your army and used a supply line to advance against the enemy, and running through both territories was a train track on which you could move a train carrying up to three players. You could make player switches inside the train so that your opponent didn’t know who was coming out. You could hide an atom bomb on the train and move it deep within enemy territory. If your opponent attacked the train, thinking she was going to capture your players, the bomb would explode, killing everything within a two dot radius. Or you could explode the atom bomb yourself and wipe out key enemy players. So you guarded the track against such eventualities. We played at the height of the Cold War.

At boarding school, where I lived for fourth through six grade, we had game nights. It was a Mennonite school, conservative, so many games were off limits. We couldn’t use playing cards but instead used “safe” cards like Rook and the ultimate speed game Dutch Blitz. I was good at Dutch Blitz. (My favorite Dutch Blitz game was years later when Andrea Agee made giant cards and people had to run to the center to get their card and run back to their team to build their piles) Outside, we played tetherball and foursquare and other active games, but we were not allowed to play Cowboys and Indians, chucking pine cones at each other or aiming sticks at each other for a kill. How naturally children pick up these games, even those who have never seen guns. I remember my confusion at being forbidden such play.

Today our family favorites were card games: the quick Euchre with its quirky bowers (apparently from the German “bauer” or farmer), responsible for introducing jokers into modern card packs. Euchre was once the national game of America and is still popular in Ontario and the northern Midwest. It may have come across the pond from Cornwall, where French prisoners played it to while away their time in Dartmoor Prison, and where it is still popular today. We also played Pinochle, another French game brought over to America by German immigrants (it was outlawed in parts of New York during WWI out of anti-German sentiment) that includes a bi-racial marriage of a black queen and a red jack. When the game was tied and within points of going out, dad and I beat the odds to get a double pinochle and win the game. We even tried Quiddler, a new favorite my Canadian friends have taught me. Mom won. I’m definitely not the only word master in my family.

Throughout the games, we talked about everything. I wonder how much family games have been responsible for passing on family news, memories, inventions, thinking, and even character. I’m glad they are part of the Patterson culture I inherited.