The year began with gin. Not the liquor, but the game. Sometime around the new year, after dinner one night, my mother asked if I wanted to learn. We sat together in the wax-warm light, our cards face up as she taught me. The tierce franche — three consecutive cards in the same suit, crucial. The jokers — when to put them down, how to steal one for yourself.
I could use card games to mark time if I wanted; I started young. As Parent Trap devotees, my sister and I would recreate the infamous poker scene, gathering scrunchies and nail polish on the carpet, perfectly reciting the dialogue between the two Lindsey Lohans while likely scrambling the order of hands. In the summers, we would play with my extended family: real chips, extra cards for the young ones. New years brought new games. Spit: my uncle bending a deck into the shape of a bridge, slapping cards down so fast I flinched. War: my cousins and I, sunburnt, crammed around the game table, twitching. Kings in the corner: my Southern step-grandmother’s lament of “Oh, pickle, pickle, pickle!” when her cards weren’t right.
I’ve discovered that I’m quite good at gin. That might not be saying much for a game based on chance, but it does involve some strategy — knowing what to keep, what you can safely lose, how to spot an opening. I’ve also discovered that my mother is a terribly sore loser. She whines and growls when her cards aren’t favorable, when I put cards down first, and especially when I win. More than one round ended in her throwing cards into the air like confetti, and me laughing so hard my ribs hurt.
I can’t blame her; I don’t like losing, either. But the difference between us is one of time: While she laughs off her grievances in moments, I let them sit around and simmer. They curl around my ribs, make their home there.
I’m not proud of it, this stubbornness. It feels pathological sometimes, holding on to something that does me no good because it still feels like losing something.
My mother and I were out walking in spare winter sun when the news broke that a horde of people — many armed, most white, and almost all maskless during a pandemic — were storming the U.S. Capitol. I read the headlines out loud to her, momentary shock turning to some terrible churning mixture of dread, anger, and resignation. No, I wasn’t surprised. No one who has lived in this country for the past four years (yes, of course it’s been longer, but most noticeably those) possibly could be. That didn’t lessen the enormity of it — the glaring reminder that this country is still built on a foundation of hypocrisy and white supremacy, violences both small and sweeping.
My grandmother — who grew up quite sheltered in a racially and economically stratified society — is now one of those reformed, well-meaning elders with liberal views and an outdated vocabulary. Still, she has a way of cutting straight to the center of something, like slicing through forest brush. “It’s really about power, and fear,” she told me seriously when I spoke to her a few days after the Capitol riot. “These people — these white men — feel like they’re losing power. And they’re afraid of that. Because they’ve had that power for so long.”
In the days following, my mother and I played gin nearly every night, my stepfather watching the news anchors pick apart the riot at full volume. Whenever I put down cards that included a joker, my mother grumbled, “Well, obviously, with a joker!” I thought about the kinds of hands different people are dealt in this country. Who holds the right cards, who plays the jokers. Who plays a hand to stay on top, at the expense of someone else.
It’s easy for a reasonable person to look at the crowd surging into the Capitol and think, “I’m not like them.” And to a point, maybe not. But that also makes it easy to forget that some of us hold some of the same cards they do. That some of us benefit from the same game rules they were trying so desperately to keep in place. (If you think I’m talking about you, I probably am. I’m also talking about me.)
I don’t ever want to be a person who harms another, intentionally or not, just to stay comfortable.
Most Januarys are for me a quiet unfurling, a hibernation where my only interests are eating, sleeping, and keeping warm. This one is more layered, gauzed over with grief. It took me well up until the midnight ball drop to grieve 2020, and I think in some ways, I’m not finished. I know I’m not alone, I know the calendar is no cure-all; still, I wish it were. I want to be like my mother, laughing away my bitterness. I want to see it flash across the back of a playing card, and then disappear. Some losses are just so hard to allow.
But I’m finding some things are worth losing, and that that is an important distinction to make — both in my own life and in the way I interact with the world. I find myself wondering: Is this a loss to grieve, or a loss of comfort? Is this a card I can afford to lose? If I lose this, if I have lost this, what might fill its place — what needs to be blown apart, to make way for something better?
In my nearly two decades of card games, rarely do I remember winning or losing. More often, I remember the apprenticing: clumsy hesitations, the satisfaction of the first good hand. Sucking air between my teeth, frustrated. The brisk rhythm, confusing, my teachers’ tenderness with my mistakes.
I have a lot of learning to do: it will not all be as low-stakes as a pile of playing cards, nor will I always be met with gentleness when I misstep. But I think the only good comes from being willing to give up a few cards. It comes from wanting to learn, to make mistakes, and to recognize those mistakes as my own.
Parting notes—
This piece from Berkeley News interviews three scholars in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. (Noticeably, none of the three are white men.)
If you’re looking to support your community more this year (we’re in month 10 of a pandemic!), this Google Doc lists mutual aid networks and resources geographically.
A historic number of Native Americans were elected to Congress in 2020. Neighbors are looking out for each other in increasingly tender ways. A new wave of legislation is coming this year. These are not places to stop, but steps forward. There will be more. If you need to be reminded of goodness, I recommend the Good News Network.
