By Dave MacNeil
“15-two, 15-four and a pair is six.”
As I lay my crib hand down and reflexively reach for the board, my pegging hand is suddenly stopped in its tracks as the elderly woman seated to my right grabs it and gently, but forcefully, offers the following admonition: “It’s not your count.”
We’re roughly a minute and a half into my debut at the weekly Friday night crib play at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Dartmouth and already it appears that I’ve committed the ultimate sin, and in the church basement no less!
I’ve been playing crib for probably 55 of my 60 years, and I never realized until that moment that I was violating the rules of the game. Playing thousands of games at home growing up and at community card plays in places like Mabou and Glencoe, and maybe tens of thousands since then, the order of counting hands never mattered, unless of course you were playing what could be the final hand.
But on this night, I’d been schooled, and it only took about 90 seconds.
That was seven years ago, and I’m happy to report that my attempt to count out of turn was the only egregious act I performed that night. In fact, I quickly discovered as my partner and I made our way from table to table that the room was full of Cape Bretoners, or at least displaced ones.
The card play is organized by Gary Moore, a local member of the Knights of Columbus and a native of Pleasant Bay, and his wife, Rosemary, a native of Dingwall. No relation to Saint Thomas More (the Moores have one more “o” in their name), the couple may not be in line for sainthood, but it was clear on night one that they have a lot of friends, as table after table held players from Pleasant Bay, Dingwall, Ingonish and numerous communities in between.
Gary, by the way, is the nephew of Walter Moore, former councillor for the Pleasant Bay area who served as Inverness County’s warden before retiring from municipal politics in the 1980s.
Cards have been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. When Dad wasn’t playing crib, his go-to game was whist, and he would often host three of his friends in a game. On those nights us kids would be dispatched to bed, but I would often lay in bed listening to the activity below.
For those who don’t know, whist is a trick-taking card game, much life bridge, which is primarily played by two teams of two. Dad and his friends would often pound their knuckles into the table with the playing of each card, the noise getting louder with each game, and I learned to tell the difference between the sounds made by their individual “knuckling” of the table. You could even tell who was winning or losing based on the repetitive drumming.
Some nights I would sneak out of bed and lay next to the grate located above the kitchen below and watch as our table took a beating.
For some reason, my memories of those whist nights are a lot sharper than my earliest memories of playing crib. In fact, I don’t ever recall being taught to play. Us kids just played, and Dad was the usual opponent.
There weren’t many days that we didn’t play, and it often required extending the day to get our games in. On more occasions than I can recall I’d be heading for the stairs to go to bed, trying to ignore Dad sitting at the kitchen table shuffling cards.
“Where are you going?” he’d call after me.
“I was going to bed,” I’d reply, as if resting my right foot on the bottom step might not give away my destination.
“Do you have a quarter?” he’d counter.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Well, sit down and have one game”
That “one game” usually became at least five, and I’d be down a quarter or two by the end of the night.
In the weeks before Dad passed away last year in his 89th year, I visited him regularly at the hospital in Inverness and of course brought the crib board along just in case. I say “just in case” but there was little chance it wouldn’t get used.
The last time we played was about a week and a half before he died. I did all the dealing and scoring, as he was starting to lose his manual dexterity, and he’d take rest breaks between hands.
The first game he beat me fairly soundly, even though I was having some pretty good luck. I started to think that maybe he was getting a bit confused when he was counting his hands. So, in the second game, I thought I’d pay more attention and double check his counting. Turned out he was actually shortchanging himself points, if anything, and he skunked me in that second game.
That skunking was the last game we ever played, and I think that was fitting, as the only thing Dad liked better than skunking his opponent was leaving him in the stink hole (for those not familiar that’s one point short of victory).