The Simplest of Delights (V): Crib

I grew up in a relatively conservative Christian tradition, but on the tail end of the evangelical world’s suspicion about playing cards. I understand that there are still some corners of the tradition where card-playing is seen as highly suspect, but on the whole, I think, evangelicalism has moved on to bigger spiritual fish to fry. That said, I do remember my cabin leader at Bible camp explaining to me that a standard deck of playing cards has its origin in the use of tarot cards, and these supposedly occult origins make card games spiritually dangerous.

This Christian suspicion of playing cards may explain the proliferation of card games based on non-standard decks of cards that circulated so widely in the Christian circles of my youth. Dutch Blitz, Rook, and Lost Heir were among the favorites, games that played with all the strategy and random chance of a bona fide card game, but without all the offending imagery of knaves and clubs and suicidal kings.

In another post I might talk about the evangelical impulse to baptize cultural practices and artefacts that we find suspect, neutering them and Christianizing them in a way that allows us to have our "holiness cake" but still eat with a worldly spoon.

That post will have to wait, though, because this post is really about the one card game that found its way into my heart despite the vague suspicion of cards that lingered in the air of the church circles my family moved in. I worded that last sentence carefully, because my own parents, I think, never breathed much of that legalistic air, despite it being a part of the spiritual atmosphere in which they raised their family. Whatever the church thought about card playing, then, still my father did his dad-ly duty and taught me early on in life the joys of playing this, what has become my all-time favorite game: cribbage.

I can still remember my first game of crib. I was maybe 12, and I played it with my Dad, he teaching and coaching me as I went. I found it confusing at first, but also mesmerizing, all that hunting for combinations that add up to 15, the back-and-forth trading of the crib, the intricacies of pegging.

Later, when I was newly married and my wife and I went on a backpacking tour of Europe, we brought a crib board with us, and would often while away the long hours waiting for trains or ferries with game after game.

Later still, when I started working at my first assignment as a new High School teacher, there was always a crib board on the table in the staffroom Over lunch we’d play as many games as we could fit in, playing for cokes and tallying our wins on the staffroom whiteboard, so everyone always knew who owed whom how many cokes at the end of the year.

I have since taught my own kids to play, and my youngest especially caught the bug. We would discuss crib strategy on long family road trips, dealing out hands and then talking over what to throw and what to keep. My daughter and I once played a year-long crib tournament where we played a game every day for a fully 365 of them, tallying the scores (1 point for a win, 2 points for a skunk). This tournament has gone down in family lore, because at the end of 365 games we finished with an exact even tie between us.

So crib has kind of been a constant card-game companion of my life.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what I love about it. It seems to me to be the perfect combination of strategy and chance, and over the years I’ve taken a life lesson from the way a very good strategy can turn around even a terrible hand in crib. I also love the many inter-related aspects of the game: choosing what to keep and what to throw, pegging, then counting your hand. There is, in this, a perfect mix of introspection and social interaction. And then there’s my fascination over the myriad ways to count points in a hand, the many different combinations of cards that make 15, the joy of a double run, the elusive quadruple run, and the rare miracle of a 29 point hand (a deal I am still waiting for, incidentally, after all these years). There are no end of delights to be had in a good game of crib.

I think the greatest joy of all, however, is the poetic playfulness of the counting that happens at the end of each hand. Early on in my exposure to crib I was taught how to add little rhymes to the end of each tally—“fifteen two and the rest don’t do,” “fifteen two, pair is four, and there ain’t no more,” and so on.

Even without these embellishments, however, there’s a rhythmic meter to that comes out when you’re counting that has always delighted me. Don’t believe it? Give it a try:

 

Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, fifteen eight, pair is ten, pair is twelve, and a quadruple run makes 24.

Legend has it that the game itself was invented in the 17th Century by an English poet named Sir John Suckling, which may explain the poetic elegance I’ve always found in the game.  You can hardly count the above hand without lapsing into sing-song.  Add this to the list of delights.

Over the last month or so at terra incognita, I’ve been reflecting on some of the small sources of joy I have in my life that help me improve and maintain my positive affect—simple delights that I can count on to lift my spirits and deepen my joy. As unspiritual as it sounds to say it, a simple game of crib is one such pleasure.

Playfulness does not generally get the same air-time in theological reflections as some of the weightier matters of life with the Lord—the atonement, prayer, acts of mercy, and so on—and perhaps there is good reason for this. That said, there’s a place in Chesterton's Orthodoxy I’ve never forgotten, where he describes a small child giggling uncontrollably over a repetitive game of peek-a-boo, squealing "Do it again! Do it again!” with unbridled delight. It’s an image I expect many of us have seen. Children, he says, never tire of repetition so long as it’s attached to joyful play like this.

But then Chesterton points out that the Creator designed our world in just such a way that the sun would repetitively rise, day after day without ceasing, always new and yet always the same as the day before. Chesterton asks us to imagine him, the Creator, delightedly calling the sun to rise each morning, just like it did yesterday, crying “do it again!” with holy delight over this celestial game of peek-a-boo.

It's almost so beautiful as to feel irreverent.

But if Chesterton's on to something here, then maybe there really is something about play that helps us glimpse something true about God. For all I know, we do in fact get a small glimmer of the delight God took in creating the world, when we enjoy the playfulness of a satisfying game. It's not nearly so glorious as a sunrise of course, but still, like each new dawn, crib too is a game that's different each time you come to it, and yet for all that, still it’s always the same as it was before.