Vietnam and Games

There were a couple of places that GI's gathered in the early evening, one being the Day Room and another being the Mess Hall. With many tables, the latter was the choice of most of those who would play games.

Dominoes

I had seen dominoes but never played any of the various domino games. However, during the evenings there were frequently two or three tables of domino players in the Mess Hall, all playing a game called Muggins. I kibitzed a bit and learned that they were playing for five cents a point. Now I am nothing if not competitive when it comes to games and I decided that I just *had* to learn to play this game.

One evening, when a game broke up, I stopped one of the players and asked if he would teach me the game. I said "I'll even play for the five cents a point while I learn."

"Nooooo, *ten* cents a point."

Well. What're you gonna do?

When it comes to games I am fairly good at strategy, very good at tactics, and top notch at simple calculations. I figured I'd get my money back before long. I signed on, so to speak, and learned the game.

Before long I was a regular in the domino games and winning more than my share of the nickles. I bought a domino set of my own and made regular appearances in the mess hall, and one night, as I entered, I heard someone halfway across the Mess Hall say, "Here comes Hendricks and his Goddamn dominoes."

Scrabble

One evening in the Day Room, Buddy approached me and said "Let's play something."

Donnie: "OK. Coon Can? Rummy? Dominoes? What?"

Buddy: "Let's play Scrabble."

Donnie: "OK. How about five cents a point?"

Buddy: "Nooooo. Fifty cents a point."

Donnie: "Let's go."

We drew tiles and I won the right to go first. With an excellent draw, I plunked down the seven letter word "saintly," dropping the four point "y" on a Double Letter square. With the fifty point bonus for using all seven letters, I got 78 points, or $39.00, for this.

He fell further behind during the game and I won perhaps $60.00. Word gets around and it was the only game of Scrabble I played in Vietnam.

Paternal Forebears

My grandmother, Flora, and great-aunt, Bertha (real names - they're long gone, bless them both) were sisters, born in the 1890s with totally different personalities. My paternal grandfather was nineteen years older than my grandmother, and died in the 1950s. The two sisters moved in together.

My grandmother was a devout and strict Methodist. My father told me that when he was thirteen or so he arrived home from school one day with lipstick on his white collar (boys wore white shirts and ties to school). After questioning my father my grandmother was horrified, not because he had kissed a girl but because she was Catholic.

I recall that she once told my father and me a story from her youth which required the use of the word "petticoats." When she said it she blushed, and when she finished the anecdote she said, "Now isn't that a story to tell two gentlemen!"

Aunt Bertha was a character, what they used to call "a card," as well as what they used to call "an old maid." She loved to tell jokes. Occasionally they bordered on the risqué, and one wondered whether she really understood her own stories.

She was adventurous: when she was in her late seventies she got her ears pierced and she was past her eightieth birthday when she went up in the Goodyear blimp.

All my life she was hard of hearing, and by the time she was eighty she was nearly deaf as a haddock. Her hearing aid was of some use but not anything approaching adequate. I remember driving her from New Hampshire to Brockton, Massachusetts after a Christmas dinner at my father's house. I had the radio on, set to some oldies station, and a 1950's rock song, Rock-In Robin, was playing. She began tapping her foot, then tapping a hand on the dashboard. When the song finished she turned to me, smiling, and said, "I love the Christmas music, Donnie."

When Flora and Bertha moved in together, they took in a nephew, the family's black sheep, Strafford, for a while. The women loved to play Scrabble, and occasionally roped Strafford into a game. After he moved out, my father discovered that Strafford had lightly scratched the backs of the more valuable tiles so that he could pick them out of a bag, sight unseen.

Strafford became a bookie and made out alright until he got busted. His telephone was taken away (the death knell for a bookie) and he moved to Miami, Florida with a quarter of a million dollars in savings. He fell in with some bad boys who got him to invest his money in a laundromat chain which laundered nothing but money, and he never got a dime of it back. The last we knew of him he was in his seventies and a hotel doorman.

At my instigation and after he retired, my father began tracing his family as far back as he could. One interesting ancestor was a 1700's New Hampshire sea captain who spent a day in the stocks - on his return from months at sea he had been greeted by his wife on the front porch of their house, and he had kissed her in public view.

Memories of My Father

• My father used two expressions to demonstrate exasperation with my brother and me: "Jesus wept!" was used when we did something stupid but were too young to know better and "Goddamn kid!" was used when we did something stupid even though we did know better.
  
  Dad and I never could do anything together in the way of manual labor without ending up convulsed with laughter. This sometimes occurred with other things as well, but always occurred when there was physical exertion, such as heavy lifting. We would lift a bed, a bench, a dresser, and get two feet down a hallway or a sidewalk and begin laughing. We would try to keep moving but in no time at all we were helpless. We could not laugh and hold the weight. It might take four or five tries to get the object to its destination. During one of those tries I would hear him say, "Goddamn kid!" and I would collapse again.
  
  
• Dad was "handy," but I am not. He could fix cars, shingle roofs, whatever, whereas my practical skills are limited to changing the filler in a ball point pen. On a good day.
  
  (As an aside: I actually knew a man - a colleague - who was more helpless than I. In his middle age he married a European woman who could do anything. At one point she went to Europe for a couple of weeks to visit relatives. While she was gone a light bulb burned out and he called her in Europe to ask what to do about it.)
  
  Dad had remarried (my parents divorced when I was in the sixth grade) and lived in the boondocks. One day, when I was perhaps 30, I visited them, and he grabbed me and hustled me up to the roof to assist in some reshingling. I could not imagine why he thought I would be useful, but it turned out that the plan was for me to pass him tools, shingles, etc., while he did the actual work.
  
  I swear, we were not on that roof two minutes before we were both laughing hysterically and hanging on to the roof's peak in order to avoid sliding off.
  
  "Goddamn kid!"
  
  
• I was perhaps six years old. It was a Saturday and my parents were going to have adult company that evening. My father announced that he was going to drive downtown to a "package store." My folks were not drinkers and there was no liquor in the house, so I didn't know what a package store was, but I knew what a drive downtown with my dad was and I asked if I might go with him.
  
  We climbed into Old Betsy, the 1939 Chevy, and I got to ride shotgun, which was a rare treat. It was no more than a ten minute ride to town. Dad parked the car along the curb and went into a store, returning a moment later with something in a brown paper bag. He set it on the seat between us and began the drive home.
  
  "What's in the bag?"
  
  "Adult Pepsi-Cola."
  
  
• I was back from the Army, and my dad and I were visiting my dad's mother and aunt, my grandmother and great aunt, both of whom loved to play Scrabble.
  
  At some point Dad was playing the game with one of them. I was reading a book when I heard him say, "Donnie, how many effs are there in 'pontiff?'"
  
  I said, "Two," and stood up to look over his shoulder at his tiles, which were P O N T I F U. I continued, "'Pontifu,' however, has only one."
  
  "Goddamn kid."
  
  
• Early in my grammar school years, perhaps around the time of the second grade, I acquired for a brief period an obnoxious habit, a sort of oral nervous tic. Whenever I said anything or anyone said anything to me, I would repeat the end of the sentence under my breath. under my breath
  
  I recall that I did it for several weeks, but the only conversation I remember was with my father.
  
  "Donnie, come here a minute." come here a minute
  
  "Stop that!" stop that
  
  "Stop what?" stop what
  
  "Goddamn kid!" Goddamn kid