Friday evening, we had an intimate family gathering of euchre-playing. I'm a relative "newbie" in the ranks of the team-choosing, possessing youth as I do, but I fair alright. As Aunt Brenda said to my Uncle Rick after I brought in the points to win the first game, "You have to remember, she has her father's strategy and her grandmother's skill." I don't know that this was all that complimentary...as my father will call trump on a nine and ten, and most of my family would rather slurp mud than play with my mother's mother. However, it ought be noted that my father and grandmother are both superbly gifted at euchre.

I won't apologize for my tangent because you ought to expect them from me by now:



An anecdote I've heard countless times recounts one game involving the two of them. My father sat at my grandmother's right, and raised a fuss after she finished dealing and realized she hadn't offered him a chance to cut the deck. She gave him the evil eye that exists altogether separately from the rosy-cheeked sweet gramma who used to send me fifty-dollar-bills a couple times a month during school just for some spending money—"for candy or stickers" she suggested. I'm a letter-writer, and so wrote her many notes in those days, before the arthritis in her hands made correspondence painful. Not many people write letters any longer. My practice obviously pleased her.

But EUCHRE-GRANDMA, she blossomed black smoke from her nostrils and shiny metal points poked through at her temples as she reshuffled the 24-card deck. She thudded the pile heavy-handedly in the space before my father. I should note here that my father is a smart ass. I take after him in more ways than I care to admit, but I'm rather proud of my smart ass-ness. After all, as Brenda tells me, "It's better to be a smart ass than a dumb ass."

Dad tapped the top of the deck delicately with a shit-eating grin and replied cheerily, "Pass!"

My grandmother half-raised from her seat, her palms flat against the table and supporting a good bit of her weight, and growled, "Cut the GOD. DAMN. CARDS."

And there you have it, a little insight for you on my euchre exposure—with a little "I don't care if I lose" prowess thrown in from my mother. It's special.



So anyway, I was Uncle Rick's partner. This unnerved me greatly, as he was laying into the mixed drinks heavily, and could see him being abrasive with a loose cannon such as myself for a running mate. But, before the cards were even sorted, we had a kind of bonding at the table. Three of us—Brenda, Rick, and me—wore braces. Rick thinks he's got tiny fractures along his wrist. Brenda suffers from arthritis in hers. I'm a study of tendonitis with ever-emerging carpal tunnel tendencies on my dominant side. We oohed an ahhed over our collective orthopedic aids, and nearly passed them around for each other to stroke. Starry-eyed and drooling, we asked questions on the origins of our support systems, their effectiveness, their relief.

My cousin, Jean, snorted from behind our share-time, having decided that she valued her life too much to play euchre with her inebriated father, "You three are gonna be fun to watch." She proceeded to mimic a sort of pathetic motion wherein she rolled her shoulders up and inward, tucked her elbows to the sides of her chest an tossed imaginary cards as though the limbs of her upper body began at her forearms. The laughter was rolling and deafening because, well, she looked like an idiot...and because we probably all looked like idiots too. I find it sad that I can laugh at myself looking like an idiot while sober, and the rest of the lot need a couple hours of alcohol-consumption in their system first.

Our game of one-handed euchre held many joys, however. We looked like idiots, no doubt...we probably even sounded like idiots—what, with my learning Rick's strategy that the team who played parallel to the bathtub ran with the better luck—but it seemed to work. Rick and I played parallel to the tub all night...

...and we won every game. One-handed and all. Maybe the drunken-maimed get a leg up...or maybe the bathtub is a force to be reckoned with after all.