
My Ludipedia, Part the First
I have been thinking a lot about the various games which occupied my time and imagination over the many years. This fit of nostalgia-infused rambling is dedicated to a work colleague, in part because he wanted to know what my favorite games were (and are).
My first draft of this article was fairly short, but I received some wonderful suggestions for new ways to explore this topic, and it has subsequently grown in length. I’ve therefore decided to bring it down into smaller chunks. This first piece covers the first decade of my life. Subsequently pieces will follow.
I never really see myself as a gamer. I’m clearly not in the stereotypical slots of either immature straight white men or avid adult Japanese men who dedicate themselves to gaming conquests. I do, on occasion, refer to myself as a gaymer, but usually because I like to explore the many aspects of living life on the rainbow.
Looking back, there are certainly large and long gaps in my gameplay history, my ludipedia as I call it. But for my childhood, gaming went beyond the traditional board game.
I recall from early in my life the unmitigated glee I felt when realizing I was about to trounce my younger brother as we played Candyland or Chutes and Ladders. They were games of luck, but as we sat there on the floor of our little house in Tappan, and as I clutched what seemed to be large, heavy dice in my small, chubby hands, I fervently directed my energy into them, calling out loudly the exact numbers I needed to set my brother back or, better yet, to win once and for all.
There was a lot of that glee in my childhood in Tappan, for the few years we lived there. My father would come home from work in the city tired on most days, but there were summer weekends when he would pick up his baseball bat and a small, soft ball, and head out into the little backyard, my brother and I delightedly following in his wake. We were waiting, breathlessly, for the moment when Daddy would reach the hedges, turn and face the house, and then, with an air of his glowing ease and majesty, hit the ball clear over the house and into the front yard.
The game was on! Who could reach the ball first? My brother Kevin? Me? There were two routes to the front yard from where we stood beside Daddy. In the course of those afternoons, I was methodical. Testing the times for each one over and over again. Ordering Kevin to participate in my childish calculations. Go right, Kevin. Follow the dirt driveway to the front of the house. And I would run to the left, squeezing myself between the side of the house and the towering hedge that not only bordered the end of the backyard but also ran from there to end of our property along the street out front. We would arrive in the front yard, laughing from the joy of the competition, happy to be playing with Daddy, and then, once either Kevin and I had found the ball, we would again race, this time back to Daddy, and excitedly present him with the ball in the happy certainty that he would hit it again after he finished gently brushing the twigs out of the hair of whichever of us I had decided must take the hedge route that time.
There were other moments of joy and glee in that little house in Tappan as well. My paternal grandmother, who had by that point retired and was spending her time visiting the families of her six children for a month or two at a time, came to stay quite often. In her, Kevin and I experienced a lot of delight. My parents, my mom in particular, were pretty strict about what we could and couldn’t eat, for example, but grandma felt it was her responsibility to take me and Kevin, her first two grandchildren out of the house for ice cream whenever she could. We always went to Friendly’s, just down the street from where she had lived in Pearl River, another suburban New York town, a few towns northwest of Tappan.
She drove a dark green Buick that hadn’t been designed for child passengers. I remember that there were seatbelts, but this was a time before people consistently starting using car seats for six- and four-year-olds, which is how old I and Kevin were at the time. So we were buckled in together on the front seat, a vast bench of leatherette upholstery with next to zero friction, especially when the passengers were children-sized in weight. The slightest curve and we were pressed up against each other, either where the seat buckle met the seat, or against the locked car door. Not only was that fun for both of us, we were sitting in the coveted front seat, where normally only mommy and daddy could sit.
As we sat in a booth at Friendly’s, sharing a big sundae among the three of us, with Kevin and I on yet another leatherette bench, albeit not as long as the Buick’s, grandma would take out a deck of cards. She taught us how to play solitaire once, but that didn’t really hold my attention. You could win at solitaire, in theory, but it didn’t truly feel like a victory unless someone else lost.
And so she taught us to play Crazy Eights and then Gin Rummy. My mother’s father liked to play poker, and grandpa would only allow his grandchildren to watch, never to play, but it had exposed me to the magic that is shuffling a deck of cards. At age six, I couldn’t really master that skill. My hands were small and soft, and the cards usually went scattering across the table when I tried to emulate the grace my grandma displayed time and time again in that booth in Friendly’s.
She taught us our card suits, and how to tell jacks from queens and kings. Both of us were able to pick up Crazy Eights quickly, but even though both games could see players amassing very large hands of cards, I only ever remember being challenged to keep all my cards help up in front of me when playing Gin Rummy.
Especially after seeing the paucity of cards involved in grandpa’s poker games with my uncles and with daddy, there was something almost taboo about sweeping up dozens of cards in the discard pile just because the card you realized you needed was at the bottom of that pile.
Rummy was not a game I could win at often. One reason is that grandma had been playing for much longer and was very good at it. But another reason was that I often paid more attention to my grandma’s stories, as she sat there opposite her grandsons, sometimes taking a spoonful of sundae, glancing back and forth at her cards, and reminiscing as I later learned Irish women loved to do.
As I grew up, I realized that my Auntie Ann, my grandma’s youngest child, had inherited the story-telling gift (as, apparently, have I), and Auntie Ann became the keeper of family lore. But I had heard nearly all of those stories first from my grandma, while in a booth at Friendly’s, resting my rummy hand on the Formica tabletop.
Grandma was not just entertaining as a storyteller. It was a revelation to me as a child to imagine my daddy at my age, for example, doing things I wouldn’t dream of. Or her story about how first Uncle Fred, and then later, Uncle John and Aunt Mary, almost burned down the house in Pearl River, and how she had learned to stop wherever she was if the fire whistle blew, to listen to the coded whistle blasts that let the volunteers know where to drive to. Was it her house again? And although this must have been terrifying to all involved at the time, in her retelling, her children became scamps and scoundrels, driving her mad, and I laughed with surprise as her expressions changed over the course of the story — angry one moment, loving the next.
Please note that my opinions, recollections, etc., are mine alone, and are not reflective of my employer.
