Menage à Trois Bingo

This election has poisoned a lot of my vocabulary. “Tremendous” and “huge” are both suspect, unless I am intentionally evoking the ghost of the toupeed pumpkinhead, and why would I want to do that. Back in 2008 I lost “you bet” and “you betcha” to Sarah Palin. Those were less painful losses, as I’ve mostly moved away from the Northern Midwest where my accent picked them up.

But now I can’t use the word “trump”, even in a card game, without cringing inwardly. Pinochle and hearts and sheepshead and euchre and even Five Crowns are dear to my competitive little heart, and the word “trump” is rather important to all those games.
Basically, if it’s a card game with trick-taking and trump cards, I’m likely to love it. (Except I never got the hang of bridge. Mostly because I stopped hanging out with the person I started to take bridge lessons with, and the only other person I knew who played was my grandmother, who had dementia by then and could no longer play.)

Pinochle was the family game. Both my dad’s family and my mom’s, even though they were from completely different backgrounds and locations. So of course they taught me and my sister to play from the age of eight or so. It was a big deal when we were both good enough at it that we could partner each other and hold our own against our parents. It’s still the default activity whenever I’m around my parents or aunts, although neither Rosa nor her cousins play, nor did most of mine ever learn, because my aunts didn’t marry men who played or were willing to learn.

Back when I was still married to Ray, we tried teaching him. He learned, sort of, but was a very bad loser, and quickly began to refuse to play. He will still occasionally trot out “I once maimed a man playing pinochle” if the topic happens to come up. He is one of those people who, having once found a phrase or saying funny, will repeat it endlessly until you are ready to strangle him to make it stop.

In high school, I taught a group of my friends to play pinochle, and we used to play every day over lunch. But I lived in Wisconsin, where the trick-taking game of choice is sheepshead, so of course I wanted to learn to play. I can’t tell you how many times I was told it was impossible to learn unless you’d grown up with it. My parents, having come from elsewhere and moved to Wisconsin as adults, didn’t play. Presumably their friends also refused to teach them. In any case, eventually I convinced someone to teach me, and played it for several years on church retreats and such, until I moved out of the state and no longer had anyone to play with.
I fetched up in Indiana, where the local game was euchre. And people were willing to teach it, even. Again, played for several years, and then moved out of state.

Now I’m lucky if I get to play cards once every six months or so, for no particularly good reason except lack of convenient flat surface to play on. Tammie knows pinochle, but there are only two of us and it’s really not that great as a two-person game. Though I did meet someone over the weekend who knows the game. Hmmm.

Voting accomplished. I was very pleased to vote for a woman for President, for the first time ever. I voted for Obama last time around, but Hillary Clinton has impressed me a lot over the last several years and I've come to believe that most of the opinions I had held about her were based on Republican slanders from the 90's and had nothing to do with her actual record. There are things in her actual record I disagree with, but there are such with Sanders as well, and I have been disappointed by his choice of campaign staffers and the overall whiteness of his support. In addition, I feel that Hillary's experience in diplomacy is vital at this point for America's future in the world. I will, of course, vote in the general election for whichever of Bernie or Hillary is actually nominated, because Please See Icon, because Supreme Court, and because the Republican slate contains not a single candidate I can foresee doing a decent job of governing, let alone having policies I could actually support. [gratuitous and reflexive personal insults toward the available Republican candidates redacted]

When they handed me my ballot, though, I was very surprised to see NINE names on it. I've never even heard of six of these guys. O'Malley quit six weeks ago, but I guess they don't remove names from the ballot in Missouri, or it was too late to do so.

Jon Adams
Hillary Clinton
Roque De La Fuente

Henry Hewes
Keith Judd
Martin O'Malley

Bernie Sanders
Willie Wilson
John Wolfe