Canasta

Canasta

Sitting at the kitchen table, my mother arranged her cards. My sister and I and Sandy from down the street did the same. Canasta had swept into our neighborhood.

That entire summer we all played all the time, except for Daddy. If it wasn’t cribbage or poker, he wasn’t interested. But my mother would sit in if we needed a fourth. She was pretty good, too, much to our surprise. We had gotten to the age when our parents had suddenly grown dumber and we would have to explain things to them. Like explaining dirty jokes to my Mother. Of course I realize now that she was playing dumb so she could find out how much we understood about sex.

But canasta ruled that summer. We started keeping logs of our scores and adding them up every day. We quit when the scores got into the hundred of thousands and it wasn’t fun doing the addition any more. One big problem was that often we’d have to let the little kids play, like Sandy’s brother and Gretchen who was even younger than my sister. And half the time they’d get the meld wrong and Gretchen wouldn’t even arrange her cards into suits.

When I think about the hours and hours we spent at kitchen tables that summer it’s a wonder we got any vitamin D at all. We lived at the kitchen table in our house, in Sandy’s house, in Gretchen’s, and at the Meitner’s where it was cooler because they moved their kitchen table to the screened-in porch. We hated it when suppertime rolled around and we had to vacate the table. But after supper and the dishes cleared, we were right back at it.

And then when school started again, just as mysteriously as it had arrived the canasta craze died, and we went back to other things again. But the kitchen table still sits in the middle of my childhood card-playing memories.