Card Sharks

When I was 9 or 10, I beat an old man at cribbage, high on a mountain. I have no recollection of this encounter, but my father swears it happened, and so it must be true.

This was during one of my family’s multi-day hiking outings when we’d string days on the trail with a night or two at an Appalachian Mountain Club hut. Apparently, the old man was both thrilled and surprised to have been out-pegged by a little girl. Maybe he’d gone easy on me. I have no idea.

The cribbage story is one of the tales my family tells of these outings – along with my older brother’s disagreement with the green spaghetti we ate one night and my younger brother filling his small, teddy bear-toting backpack with rocks along the trail. So I remember it without actually remembering.

I also don’t remember learning to play cribbage, although I imagine this happened over a series of winter nights spent in Franconia, where we came to ski on weekends – and where, when I was growing up, our television received only one or two channels, and that only if the cloud cover was aligned perfectly over the unwieldy antenna on the roof.

In the absence of television and smart phones (heck, back then we shared a party line with the other half-dozen houses on our road), we either read or played games through the long winter evenings and the occasional summer nights spent at the house. There were rousing, post-supper, multi-generational rounds of Balderdash and Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit when friends were over. And, apparently, quieter and more contemplative contests over the cribbage board when fewer people occupied the living room.

Despite growing up in the digital age, my children have become quite the little card sharks in recent years. I will take very little credit for this, as I don’t have the patience to teach card games, with all their intricacies, to anyone. Some games I have learned – or re-learned – along with the kids.

My husband has taught the kids to play Hearts and what we call Bull Poop (rather than the more adult-language name for the game), along with a couple variations of solitaire. He and my parents have also worked to hone the kids’ cribbage skills. Friends have taught them to play Kings in the Corner and Beggar My Neighbor.

Most nights after dinner, at least one of the kids asks to play some card game or another, and in these summer evenings that seem to stretch long between dinner and bed, we usually fit in a round or two of something.

Already, the children have developed a sense for card game strategizing that often escapes me. They delight in holding the Queen of Spades and giving her away at the perfect time in Hearts, and they usually know someone is trying to “shoot the moon” before I do. They can often tell when someone is bluffing at Bull Poop and have learned to count ahead to see which cards they should try to unload at which turn.

It is only at cribbage where I feel I have a slight advantage, but I may be fooling myself here. My older daughter tallies each hand quickly in her head and sometimes knows my score before I have finished counting it out. Both she and her brother have beaten me in cribbage fair and square. (I have never been the mom who lets her kids win – except, perhaps, when they were tiny and wanted to play Candy Land, and I tried to organize the cards so the game wouldn’t last to the point of boring me to tears.)

Last week, the littlest one wanted to learn to play cribbage. She played against a sibling with my husband’s help and was soon ready to tackle the game solo. In her first game on her own, she beat me, and was on the way to skunking me before I managed to close the gap in the last hand.

I think there’s probably some educational value in the card-playing – basic math, planning ahead, having to choose what to keep and what to let go. Mostly, though, it’s just a fun way to pass the time together – wherever we are. A deck of cards slips easily into a pocket or a purse – or a backpack.

Later this summer, we have a two-night hut trip planned in the mountains with another family of card-playing friends. We’ll pack a couple of decks of cards and our smallest cribbage board. Perhaps one of the kids will challenge a stranger to a round, and that will become part of the story we tell many years – and many rounds of cribbage – from now. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 13, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Futbol Fever!

There’s a makeshift soccer “pitch” wedged between the long grass of our wild east field and the stone wall along the driveway, soccer balls lay scattered around the yard, and my children have been allowed lately to eat their lunch – and occasionally their dinner – in front of the television, which broadcasts several soccer games each day. It’s a World Cup year, and it seems we have a serious case of Futbol Fever.

I have loved soccer for as far back into my childhood as I can remember. American football and field hockey reigned supreme in the autumns of the town where I grew up. But soccer was always my game. Sure, as a kid I shot baskets in the driveway and played touch football in the backyard on Thanksgiving, but I also scarred the garage doors (and broke at least one light) kicking a ball against them when there was snow blocking my way to the backyard backstop my dad built to feed my soccer addiction.

I don’t like watching American football and never have. Basketball bores me to tears. Baseball I can get into come October, but the six months prior to playoffs are much too long, with far too many games, to hold my interest. Hockey I love, although I don’t watch it much anymore. I don’t watch much television at all, really, in these days of fitting work and downtime around playing with and caring for three active kids. But for the past two weeks, the tube has been turned on and tuned to ESPN for much of every day. I like the noise and the color of the World Cup, even if it’s just playing in the background.

When I was a junior in college, the United States hosted the World Cup, and I landed a volunteer post in the press tent at the Foxboro venue. For one game – the quarterfinal between Italy and Spain – I was on the pitch, just behind the goal line, as a film runner. The photographers would dump a roll of finished film from the camera, toss it to one of us while reloading, and off we’d sprint to wherever it was they developed the photos.

On the field at the 1994 World Cup

It was a completely unglamorous and entirely amazing job. I got to be on the field during the pregame team warm-ups and for most of the game. I was on the field with some of the world’s best footballers. I was in heaven.

I also attended a few games as a spectator that summer. Outside the stadium before kickoff, people from different places, speaking different languages and draped in the flags of the day’s opposing countries, would gather together to smile for group photos. We were there for the competition, yes, but also to celebrate – our teams, our cultures, and the Beautiful Game.

I already loved soccer, but 1994, that summer I was briefly and wholly immersed in the world’s favorite game, was when I fell in love with the World Cup. I love the pageantry of it (and I don’t mean the dives on the field – Oy!), the singing and dancing and wild color in the stands. The sense that this sport, each single game, means something huge to people around the world.

This World Cup summer my son has been most interested in the games. He asks each morning who will be playing during the day. When we come home from wherever the day’s activities have taken us, we check the scores and game highlights together. If the U.S. is playing an evening game, the kids get to stay up late and watch until the final whistle.

They have learned, during close games, to keep a safe distance from me on the couch, lest a piercing yell be sounded too close to their little ears or a flying elbow inadvertently make contact while celebrating a spectacular goal. They have been delighted by the fans of many countries wearing face paint and funny wigs. I have explained, several times (and to no avail), the offside rule and what happens when a player gets a yellow card. We have looked at maps of Europe and Africa and South America to find the countries playing and learn a little bit about them.

The other night I came outside after cleaning up the dinner dishes to find the kids involved in an impromptu soccer game. They play barefoot in the grass, just like other kids all over the world (although probably not as incessantly). They giggle wildly through each Kids vs. Mom match. They’re learning to work together, as a team. Sometimes I don’t even let them win; they come by that result by luck or burgeoning skill or, most likely, a combination of the two.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, the U.S. has earned a spot in the Round of 16, which kicks off this weekend. Two more weeks of World Cup soccer. Hooray! Even better, though, is that my son just announced, as he ran out the screen door – barefoot, of course – “I’m going down to the soccer pitch.”

Futbol Fever burns on. May it linger long beyond the final whistle of this year’s World Cup.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the June 26, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.