Some games are worth repeating. Games I played with my grandmother, my mother played with me, and I played with my children and their children. Some games were fads or popular for a season. But some taught us all things that will never lose their value with the changing seasons of life.
I just read that old typewriters like Underwoods, original old record players, Easy Bake Ovens, original Etch-a-Sketches and Chatty Cathy dolls are all valuable on the antique markets. All are “antiques” because they have been replaced by better options or some new fad. Ah, but the great games! They only get richer with each new generation who have new stories to add to conversations they trigger.
PICK-UP STICKS--Patience, focus, and skill—how we need those qualities in these times! While pharma looks for meds to stem the tide of ADHD, I suggest a pot of hot chocolate and a few rounds of pick-up sticks. Joyfully, the advantage of this game will go to the younger, steadier hand, so laughing at grandma’s less accurate skill will encourage greater comradery. But the trade-off might be that grandma as more patience for finding just the right angle to flip the stick!
CANDYLAND--This game teaches that skill and cunning aren’t always the way to win. Sometimes there is no advantage in experience, either. Life and CANDYLAND teach us that no matter how long we’ve played or how lucky we think the colorful path is that we chose, getting to our goal is just dependent on the card we draw and how we react to the set-backs none of us saw coming. Sometimes winning is just the joy of not taking ourselves too seriously and playing the game together.
DOMINOES—At first we play this game with children who are learning to count and match. But gradually the set of dominoes gets bigger with more possibilities, strategies, complications, and objectives. Gradually, too, we add more players and relationships to the community of players. This is one game Bill and I still play with friends as adults because it challenges our skills to think ahead, strategized, and sometimes get foiled by what we overlooked. But then, there is always another game!
CHESS—I never learned to play chess but our grandson Liam and others who play it tell me it is the ultimate strategy game—a game that demands more skill the longer they play it.
CARROM—When I was a kid my family had a Carrom Board. We played this game by thumping the carrom men with our finger or using a stick called a striker. The game was sort of a smaller, more affordable alternative to pool and demanded a similar kind of skill and practice to get the men into the pockets on each corner of the board. I seem to remember that Carrom was approved by some of the members of our church, while pool was not. Go figure. Maybe that was a life lesson all its own.
FLINCH—Still to this day there is a box of Flinch cards on the kids’ table in our family room, and we still play a game or two of Flinch when our youngest grandkids come home. I’m always reminded of playing this game with my grandmother while we listened to The Green Hornet, Judy Canova, and Lum and Abner on her console radio in her living room. Flinch is a game that teaches its players to count forward and backward by adding to piles of cards on the table that begin with either the numbers one or fifteen, numbers that each player must play first from each hand dealt. The “hands” in this game are just to facilitate playing the cards on the player’s “Flinch pile”; getting rid of the Flinch pile cards is the object of the game.
These days I am getting down to the end of my Flinch pile. I am not sad about that; it was, after all, always the point of game. And today I have been dealt a fresh hand to spend on my short-term and long-term objectives. I have been playing long enough to be as good at counting backward as counting forward. With each hand I must do both, always keep close watch over the actual goal of the game.
Where have I been? Where am I going? What will it take to assess where I’ve been in the light of where I am going? Most of the conversations I have with our grown children and their grown children are focused on these questions. Some are better at counting forward. My experience in counting backward and assessing what was (and was not) most helpful in getting to where I am has come from both winning and losing, and both have been not only helpful but necessary in gaining enough wisdom to walk with confidence into what the rest of the game might hold. And no amount of learning, experience, skill, or persistence will prepare me--or them--for the random surprises life will deal us. In it all, none of us will be wise enough, accomplished enough, or skillful enough to be enough. Only the Lord and Father of us all can lead us through whatever surprises life has in store until our hand is played, and we are out of dominos.
