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.

The Simplest of Delights (IV): The Family Dog

Back in 2008 our family welcomed a sixth member into our clan, our family dog Trixie. I’m not sure any of us had a clue how big a role Trixie would go on to play in our life, binding us all together over a shared responsibility for her well being (this is, I think, one of the things a family pet does; it’s one of the few relationships of care in the family that parents and children can equally carry, putting us all on the same footing of affection).

Trixie is going on 14 now, and we are entering the autumn season of pet ownership, patiently watching the sun set on her life. She is 100% blind and is beginning to lose her hearing. She has difficulty keeping food down and can’t be trusted on the couch anymore. But she’s not got any of the aches and pains that many dogs struggle with in old age, making them irritable and un-cuddle-able. Trixie still very much enjoys sitting in a lap and soaking up as much human touch as she can get.

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis talks about the Greek word storge, which refers to a kind of affectionate love that binds people together in bonds of fondness and familiarity[1]. A parent’s love for her child is storge love. So is the love shared between siblings, or the love passed among comrades, perhaps, in war. It is that affectionate, admiring, unconditional positive regard shared between people who have in some sense been “thrown together” by chance.

When it comes to feeling storge love for our pets, Lewis is somewhat ambivalent. He acknowledges the natural human tendency to do so, but also cautions against using pets to meet a need more properly met by human beings. His caution has to do with inappropriate distortions of love, however, of exploiting other living creatures (human or animal) by treating them solely as means to meet our own selfish ends. I don't think Lewis would have any objection to that healthy, generous fondness for animals that pets so often engender in their owners. In many other places in his writings, he speaks affectionately and compassionately about animals (he was especially fond of dogs and horses), and he often emphasized our creaturely kinship with the animal creation. Even in his discussion of storge in The Four Loves, he suggests that one of the best images we have for this particualr kind of love is found in the instinctive love that animals show to their young: “The image we must start with is that of a . . . [dog] or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of young life.” There is something about storge that reminds us of, and strengths our connection to the rest of God’s creatures.

Caring for a pet over the course of its life tends to deepen our capacity for storge love. It teaches us what it means to have unconditional positive regard for a creature that cannot benefit us, really, in any other way than through the storge it offers us in return. Trixie has poured overflowing measures of storge love into our family life over the years, and in a mysterious way, our shared affection for her has helped to deepen our affection for one another.

This is not the only thing loving a pet does for those who love them well. Research has shown that owning a pet can relieve depression, increase self-esteem, lower stress hormones and reduce anxiety. One study found that simply petting a dog for 15 minutes can lower your blood pressure by up to 10% [2]. I’ve not done any formal studies of my own, but my intuition tells me that after fifteen minutes of petting Trixie, I experienced all these outcomes and more: greater calmness, a deeper sense of well-being, and a stronger feeling of being grounded and connected to the world.

I’ve been reflecting over the last few weeks on things in my life that improve my daily positive affect. Small things, that is to say, that I can work into my routine to give me regular moments of joy. I don’t know how many days we have left with Trixie, but I do know—and the psychology and the theology both back me up on this one—that so long as we have her with us, one of the simplest ways to improve my “positivity hygiene,” is just to take some time and express some storge for our family dog.

The Simplest of Delights (Introduction)

The other day I was listening to an episode of a podcast called “The Awesome Project." It’s a series produced by a Canadian Positive Psychologist named Louisa Jewell which explores various topics related to human flourishing. Flourishing is what positive psychologists call it when a person is experiencing “positive mental health and overall life well-being.”[1] When we are living our best and enjoying positive well-being as a result, we are flourishing.

The whole series has been fascinating to me, but this particular episode was exploring the impact of positive emotions—things like love, gratitude, pride, or excitement—on our overall well-being. It cited studies that suggested having daily experiences of positive emotion improves our resilience, helps us recover physically from the effects of stress, and guards us against depression.

The podcast referred to the work of Barbara Frederickson, who found that “the difference between people who flourish and those who don’t, lies in their ability to generate everyday pleasant moments at a ratio of [up to] 5 positive experiences for every 1 negative emotion.” That 5:1 ratio—she called it the Frederickson’s Positivity Ratio—especially gave me pause. The brain, you might say, is like Velcro for our negative experiences and Teflon for our positive, and in order to build the resources we need to come through negative experiences with resiliency, we need intentionally to work into our routines experiences that generate these positive emotions on a consistent basis.

Psychologist Michelle McQuade uses the term “positivity hygiene” to describe all this. Just like you work regular showers and brushing your teeth into your daily schedule, because you know how important these simple acts of self-care and personal grooming are, in the same way you should work regular activities into your routine that generate positive emotional affect. These activities do not need to be intense or elaborate (this is another finding in the research). Petting the family dog could do it; listening to some favorite music could; a 15-minute walk in the woods. The key is knowing what puts you in that happy place, even if its just momentary, and becoming intentional about building those things into your day.

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for a few weeks now: the positivity ratio, and positivity hygiene, and human flourishing. It occurred to me as I listened to the podcast that I’m not really all that clear on what experiences generate positive emotion for me. At least, not in the way the podcast was talking about it, I’m not. I know in broad terms what brings me joy and what steals my joy. I have a good idea of what my idea of a “perfect day” would be. But if I were going to try to be intentional about building such moments into my day, like the way I take a shower every morning, I’m not sure what exactly I’d include on the list.

Have I been walking around, the “positive psychology” equivalent of an unwashed slob?

Like I say, it gave me pause.

It also gave me an idea for a new series here at terra incognito. Over the next few months, I’m planning to take some time to explore the simple pleasures of life, examining some of the every-day experiences, objects, encounters, or activities that serve as unrecognized sources of positive emotion for me.

This is not just for the sake of cleaning up my act, so to speak, when it comes to my personal positivity ratio (though hopefully it will help me do that). It is, more importantly, to help me remember that the Lord’s Creation is, actually, crammed full of things to take delight in, if only we took the time to savor it. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: judging from the way he wired to be able to take such pleasure in even the simplest of things, you’d have to think the Lord was a hedonist at heart. And perhaps he is. It’s just that we’re so often like fishes, swimming in the sun-warmed water of his grace and goodness and never even realizing we’re wet.

Who knows what we might discover if we took some time to ask the Lord to help us see just exactly how wet we really are?