After the kids were put to bed, we got the cards out and played a game of golf. My Grandma Peg is 93 years young. She walks a little slower and her hearing isn't as sharp, but she still is active. She still drives, lives in her own apartment, and doesn't miss a Twins baseball game on television in the summer.
I dealt the first hand and asked Grandma Peg if she knew how to play.
"I can't remember if I've played this before.", she answered in her shaky gramma voice. My dad assured her that she had played it last week with them. We had played a few rounds when Dad read off the scores. In the card game, golf, the object is to have the lowest score. Well, Grandma Peg's score was under twenty and my score had just passed one hundred.
She leaned over to me and said, "We sure make a good team don't we?" She said this because whenever I discarded, it was always a card she could use to lower her score. Oh well, it was probably just beginner's luck. It seemed she was always trying to put her cards in the wrong column until we would help her. Maybe it was all just an act she was using to sucker us.
After a few more rounds, she started making suggestions to me on which card to discard to her. I started keeping my cards so she wouldn't get them. The problem was that she would 'go out' and I would be stuck with high value cards.
I did have one good round where I went out with only five points. Grandma Peg laid out her cards and asked how much she had. I answered, "You have three points".
She asked, "And you had five points, right?"
"Yeah", I grumbled.
"Well, that's nice.", she sweetly sang.
She then quite firmly and clearly asked for an update on the scores. What happened to shaky gramma voice? Grandma was just approaching 100 points as I had passed 300.
She leaned over again and whispered, "Is this your first time playing?"
As my frustration grew I started placing the draw and discard pile further from her, making her reach for all of those good cards I was feeding her.
"Well, what do you know, another zero hand.", she announced.
I was starting to realize that I was in over my head. I knew that she played bridge with her friends twice weekly. She usually gets her name in the local paper for winning too. This frail, wispy grandma turns into a shark at the card table. I love Grandma Peg and all, but when she gives me the business like Eddie Haskel, I have to wonder what she does to all of those other old ladies at the card table.
The game mercifully ended and Dad got ready to take Grandma home. As she shuffled to the door she called back to me, "Better practice up for next time."
