Turn Down a Bower, Lose for an Hour
Both of my dad’s parents are still alive, and they live in a retirement community that shares a driveway with me. So I get to see them quite a bit. And my kids, now nearing 4 and 5, have been lucky enough to get to know them. Nana and Papa, to them.
My grandfather is not doing so great, though. It’s been months and months of one thing after another. Chemo, then radiation, then a broken back, then heart failure, then lung damage. Then just a couple days ago, the tumor’s back and they have to decide if they want to try radiation again or not, but the conversation is definitely shifting towards comfort and quality of life as opposed to treatment.
And for my grandfather, part of palliative care is apparently Euchre.
I don’t remember life without Euchre. When my family gets together we peel off into multiples of four and play. Not a Christmas morning goes by without the sounds of “pass, pass, pick it up” from at least one corner of the house. We took a trip canoeing in the Boundary Waters, and the first evening, after making camp, we hauled a canoe up on shore, flipped it over, dried off the underside, and broke out the cards.
My grandfather worked in insurance, at a company called Carr Agency. And apparently one of the perks was an infinite supply of Carr Agency-branded orange-backed playing cards. I swear you could have built an igloo with the number of decks the family had. He hasn’t worked there in forever, but we still have a few Carr decks around, though they’re nigh impossible to shuffle. And any box of them you opened, you would see that half are pristine and in one side of the box, and 9s and up are heavily used and partitioned in the other half. Hell, sometimes they just threw away everything 8 and lower (but keep the 5s) and gave the Euchre decks more space. Shake a box of cards, and if it rattles it’s a Euchre deck.
I learned how to play Euchre with these orange cards. Hell, I learned how to play games with these orange cards. I learned about risk and sportsmanship and trusting your partner and taking turns and spending time with your family and teamwork and old family sayings and playing for fun and trump and tricks and so many things that are still a huge part of who I am today. It’s good luck to sit with the bathtub, try it alone if you’ve got four, turn down a bower and lose for an hour, and NEVER trump your partner’s Ace.
My grandfather doesn’t really talk much. He doesn’t express much of an opinion. He doesn’t share feelings or worries. Only one time in years of asking have I gotten him to open up about his time in the military and tell me stories about his life. If you ask him what he wants to eat, he shrugs, and when he’s done eating whatever you gave him and you ask if he liked it, he shrugs again.
But here, when doctors are starting to talk about comfort and we ask him what he wants to be doing, he actually has an opinion: “play cards.”
My wife and I brought over dinner last night. We plugged the kids into the TV and broke out a deck of orange cards. They were so old and gross and sticky that we tossed them and got a deck with birds on it. My grandfather and I teamed up and we won both games back to back. That last game we should have lost, but he pulled out two Euchres for four points on the last two hands, getting extremely lucky the way the cards fell. He looked at me and shrugged the most hilarious don’t-look-at-me-that-was-impossible shrug.
I fear that one or both of them will be gone before my kids are old enough to learn the game and play it with them. But we’ll teach them, regardless. Hidden away on my game shelves where no one will find them is a pristine, still-in-shrink deck of orange Carr Agency cards that I’ll use to teach them when they’re ready. And when they go to turn down a bower, well, you know what Papa always said...