The Queen of Spades

A child's memories can be an image of an instant—vivid, disconnected from what came before or even after. The question "Why?" is often unanswered in these images, though years and decades later a close inspection by that child-now-adult can reveal much.

A child's memories can also be cumulative, a tesselate of instances formed over many occurrences of the same action. For me, such is the Queen of Spades.

Card games were omnipresent in our family, beginning with the simple games of matching, such as Uno or Go Fish! They were fun, quick, and without the our awareness of it, these games begin the process of building memory skills. Once mastered, we moved on to games that entailed not only memory, but sorting and matching, such as gin rummy.

The big step in playing card games came when we graduated to adult card games. Oh, to play an adult card game with adults! That was to aspire to! A more heartless game than Hearts there is not, at least in cards. In addition to the memory and sorting and matching skills, we now began the process of learning strategy, of computing the odds that the person across from us held such-and-such a card.

Of course, we played "open hand," at first, laying down all cards, and learning the rules and seeing how each hand obeyed and gauged the odds. The first few games with our hands concealed were probably nerve-racking, but nothing disastrous happened. For some unknown reason (ahem!), I usually ended in the middle of the pack: neither outright winner nor dejected bottom of the heap.

Then came the day I shot the moon—where I took all the hearts and the queen of spades so I not only won, but made the quintessential win. In looking back, I doubt it was because I was allowed to win. I had simply been dealt the right cards, made the right assessments of who was holding which cards, played the cards in the right order, and ended in victory. Elation was the least of my emotions.

Then hard on the heels of that win came a hand where I not only lost, but watched as my father deliberately and with a look I could not fathom, placed the Queen of Spades (13 points against me) on my trick. How could he do that? How could he be so deliberate?

I was hurt. Devastated. Tears formed and stung.

I'd prefer to say I had an epiphany, maybe while eating cereal or munching on raisins after school, but gradually I realized a valuable lesson lay in that memory.

If you have what it takes to win, you must also have what it takes to lose.