It was hilarious growing up and watching my dad raise three daughters. He knew nothing much about young girls even though he had a sister. She was twelve years younger than he was, so he was completely unprepared for having daughters.
I am the oldest and was an unholy terror as a child, so he had a lot on his plate. When I became a preteen, he began having difficulty folding laundry…he had to look at my “unmentionables”. He would let me know in a whisper that I had a bra or panties in the laundry basket. It would crack me up that he was rather prudish about it all.
Dad was always rather shy about “girl” things and rarely said much about it. Mom was the one we would go to for personal discussions. And with him being a minister, he was strict about practically everything and tried to keep a tight rein on his girls. So when something outrageous happened to him one summer, he couldn’t live it down. We still laugh about it to this day.
It was summer in 1975, I was sixteen, and we were on vacation at Myrtle Beach. My boyfriend, whom I eventually married, was along with us, and we had borrowed a small brick house from a friend. The little house was located about a half mile from the ocean.
We had a wonderful time on our first day. We walked to the beach, swam, played in the surf, worked on our tans, then came back to the house for huge slices of watermelon. The next morning….it rained. And rained. And rained.
Two days later, it was still raining, and we were bored out of our minds. In desperation, my boyfriend reached in his suitcase and pulled out a deck of cards.
“Let’s play cards,” he said with a smile. I looked at my sisters and our eyes widened. Cards? You mean Satan’s playthings? The small pieces of cardboard that lead to sin and degradation as lectured by my dad’s mother? We waited for dad to unleash a sermon on us all.
But he didn’t say a word. That is how bored he was. Instead, he sat down with us and watched as my future husband taught him how to play poker. With no poker chips, we decided to use pretzel sticks. We had a bagful.
It was five hours later that we realized my father had become a poker addict with a vicious desire to win back his pretzels at any cost. He wouldn’t let us go to bed until he had won back his stale pretzels. In desperation and exhaustion, we let him win and finally went to bed.
The next morning, we all decided to hide the cards from my dad. It turned out to be a good plan because right after dinner that night he suggested a game of cards. We all looked sheepish and said we lost the deck. Dad began feverishly looking for the cards, but since they were carefully hidden, he finally gave up and sulked.
The next day after lunch, dad said he had to go to the store. When he returned, he had a brown paper bag which he gleefully dropped on the kitchen table. He reached inside the bag and pulled out a deck of cards wrapped in paper.
“Look what I bought!” he exclaimed joyfully. “Since we lost the deck, I bought another pack of cards so we can play again.” Inside we all groaned. Evidently, he was determined we were going to play again tonight regardless.
Reluctantly we grabbed the pretzels and pulled up chairs. It was going to be a long night.
As dad unwrapped the pack, he began shuffling the cards…then suddenly stopped. He froze then gasped out loud.
Looking at the cards in his hands I saw what he saw….naked ladies pictured on the back of each card.
Dad turned five different shades of red as he huffed out loud and stuffed the trashy cards back into the paper sack while trying to explain and stammering something about seeing a sign that said “Playing Cards” and grabbing a pack. Now we knew why the deck had been wrapped in paper.
While dad hurriedly removed the cards from our vicinity, the rest of us were falling all over the table and floor, laughing until we couldn’t catch our breath. My dad had been HAD! He had been caught by his own evil inclination to win all of our pretzels! He had received what was coming to him! It was too funny.
That week began and ended my dad’s interest in card playing, especially poker. I’m not sure if he even still eats pretzels.
I guess my grandmother was right when she said that cards lead to sin and degradation. But maybe that’s just him.
