Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog

Cribbage always makes me think of my Grandpa H. He was the one largely responsible for teaching me how to play when I was just a squirt. To this day, it’s the only card game that I would say I actually know how to play. Sure, we play poker at bowling (one card for a spare or strike, two cards for two strikes in a row), but I always have to consult a cheat sheet.

My grandparents would come from Wisconsin to visit us in Ohio for a couple of weeks each year (as we did them). My memory of my grandfather teaching me cribbage is that it happened on the back porch at our house, which would imply that it was warm enough to be outside, which would imply that it was not winter. But I also remember that our visits to them were in the summer as well. It seems a little strange that we wouldn’t have gotten together for holidays. Then again, with the cross-Midwest drive I guess it’s not actually mysterious that nobody planned the drive for Christmas and winter.

Anyway, my grandpa taught me how to play cribbage and he taught me well.

But not well enough to save one relationship I was in. “He” and I had played a bunch of games over the course of a couple weeks and I had lost all of them, and I finally snapped and called the relationship off. Of course things would have had to have been shakey to begin with at that point for something so trivial to become a mountain, and they were for a particular reason, but my twentieth cribbage loss in a row finally broke this camel’s back.

It’s true that whenever I get out the cribbage board I think of this guy just a little, but enough time has passed (you know, more than twenty-five years) that it’s not unpleasant. In fact, I just looked him up online and he’s still very attractive.

But I digress.

These days, it’s mostly when my mom lays a guilt trip on me during my parents’ visits that I play. She and my grandfather also played a lot, and she and I played a lot. Now, she usually has to pull teeth. I suppose it’s stubbornness on my part. When they’re here, it’s the one thing I can get away without doing right away or at all, because everything else she just pesters until I do it because I get fed up with the constant, um, mentioning. It’s a power struggle.

I enjoy playing, I just don’t want to have to feel like I have to. Evidently my cat feels differently.