Shanghai Rummy

It’s kind of funny how we don’t seem to recognize the things we take for granted and the things we don’t realize that we appreciate until they’re taken away from us. For this first memory, I’m going to take you back about as far as I can remember. A long, long time ago in a state far, far away, I lived in a house on the edge of a mountain. The view from our kitchen was spectacular to the little kid that I was, as were many of the strange devices there.

The stove had a fantastic button that would raise and lower a metallic heat shield, but I was too young to understand its purpose. The phones were touch dial, and my friends had different tonal songs associated with their phone numbers. Later, an even more fascinating device would be added that would allow us to see who was calling before we even picked up the phone, but lets not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Our kitchen had several more fantastic devices with various features, including a rather oversized microwave, but more appealing than any of these was a small plastic bag whose permanent home was on top of this microwave; a plastic bag that was only brought down on special, very rare occasions, but I always looked forward to these occasions.

The little plastic bag could be seen sitting on top of the microwave any day of the year, but it was only pulled out when my grandmother came to visit. The bag contained two sets of cards, both about the same size and just as worn down. The first was a stack of three full decks of cards all shuffled together. The second was a rather odd game that tasked its players to build a house from the cards in his or her hand. Each of the cards had bent corners, because some time before, one of my cousins had the bright idea of bending the corners of particularly valuable cards so they would be easier to spot. In response, my grandmother had the even brighter idea of bending the corner of every single card so they all once again looked the same. Even then, the game was out of print, so we had one of the few copies available, but it remains one of my favorite card games although the deck has since been lost and I’m fairly sure I will never get to play it again.

Some cards from "Raise the Roof"

Regardless, hearing that my grandmother was coming over to visit was always a cause for excitement among all of us. Though this wasn’t the only thing we did, playing cards together brought us together as a family in a way that we seemed to never be able to on our own; at least not until we were older.

During her visits, we could go about the house playing wherever we wanted, but I would never let the kitchen table out of my sight. If you weren’t careful, they would start without you, and it’s no fun entering the game in the second or third rounds.

On the nights that we played Shanghai Rummy, there was an additional step. Shanghai Rummy consists of ten hands of various sequences, and despite how often we played it, none of us ever bothered to memorize the hand sequences. Every time we sat down to play, one of the first topics of conversation would be who actually remembered the rules. Of course, nobody ever did, so one of us would have to scurry off to a computer to look them up and scrawl them down on a spare piece of paper. This extra step often provided just a little extra time to jump in if you were late in realizing that everyone was sitting down around the table, and sometimes it was enough to allow me to drag a chair up to the table at the last minute.

The games were usually held on Fridays and Saturdays, when we didn’t have school the next day. As we all gathered around the table, we would split up the thick deck into pieces so everyone could help shuffle. While the representative went off to write down the rules, the rest of us would argue about whose turn it was to deal first.

Games generally began in the late afternoon and went on well after sundown and into the night. At some point, someone would have to stand up and slide the lights on. They were the style that allowed you to adjust the brightness, so whoever manned the lights usually turned them all the way up, then slightly down. To this day, that pattern is something that I don’t associate with anything else other than our game nights.

Inevitably, one of us would get stuck with a bad draw on the first two or three rounds and fall way behind the rest. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was my grandmother, sometimes it was one of my sisters. We all knew what it was like to be that person, and when it wasn’t us, we were always secretly grateful, though none of us would ever voice it. When this happened, my grandmother would always laugh at our pettiness and recall the story of the one night when her husband got the worst score in the history of humanity. She would wave off our abysmal scores and tell us that we wouldn’t be able to be as bad as he was at this game if we tried. None of us ever tried, of course, but the story always made us feel a little bit better about it.

Now that I’m older, I realize a bit better what she meant. In those days, we paid so much attention to the score and who was doing better that we didn’t really pay attention to how nice it was to play together. In the end, the score didn’t matter at all.

My sisters and I all live in far corners of the country now, and it’s a very rare occasion when we are able to all be in the same place at the same time. However, for my grandmother’s birthday last year, we all managed to show up at her house in Florida, and, inevitably, we all gathered around a table to play Shanghai Rummy. It wasn’t until then that I really noticed how much I missed the game, or exactly why I missed it.

I plan on going into more detail about this later, but living with three sisters means that part of playing a game is always being conscious of how much fun the other party is having or the game will end. This often means strategically losing so the game can go on longer, and many games become less about who is winning and more about how long you can get the other person to play with you.

As an adult, I have much more experience, and have become much more cunning with these strategies. In the earlier stages of Shanghai Rummy, wild cards are commonplace and almost irrelevant. However, as the stages advance, the sequences become more complex and wild cards become almost necessary in order to end a round.

On this particular occasion, in what I considered a brilliant strategy to extend this game as long as possible, I managed to pull most of the wild cards out of the deck over the course of ten hands. Every time I would draw a wild card, instead of playing it, I would set it aside and find a way to play my hand without it, the idea being that if nobody could end a round in the later stages, the game would extend until somebody got too tired or caught on to what I was actually doing.

When I revealed what I was doing, my little sister was furious. Why would I destroy this precious family time? Why would I make a mockery of one of her favorite memories? I can’t say that I didn’t expect a reaction like this, but the answer is fairly simple: I wanted to spend more time with you. I wanted to extend this precious time we have, for all of us, and if I have to sacrifice winning a card game to do it, that’s fine with me.

Over the next few days, I think she came to understand that I wasn’t trying to mock her, and I’ve long since forgiven her for it. It’s a pattern the two of us seem to always go through, and if that’s what it takes to stay in contact, I think I’m okay with that. It’s only a card game after all. Although we’re all siblings, the four of us all seem to be so different. It may only be a card game, but it’s one of the few things that all four of us have in common, and I hope we will always be able to find time to play this game together.