Monastic Gin
I am sitting with my father, playing gin rummy, but I might as well be sitting in a monastery or any retreat house.
I am here for a week. Our days are simple and highly ritualized. Breakfast is at 8:30. (Two eggs on an English muffin, daily, for him.) We may converse for a while after breakfast, but conversation is always an effort for Dad. He turned 95 in February and is so nearly deaf he tried (unsuccessfully) for cochlear implants. He cranks up his hearing aids and I enunciate and we can dispatch any topic. But it takes a gentle kind of work. So it isn’t long before we refresh our coffee mugs, clear the table and set up for gin rummy.
This we can do in silence. His hands are too arthritic to shuffle, and the neuropathy in his finger tips makes it impossible to deal or hold his cards. But he can crank his automatic shuffler, and I always deal (we use two decks: the yellow deck means he is the “dealer” and has first draw, and the black one is mine). He arranges his cards in a rack.
We can play like this for hours. It may take seven hands for the winner to rack up 500 points, and that can take an hour and a half, maybe more if we dawdle long over our moves. The only sound is the flutter of the shuffler, the tick tock of the clock, the singing of the refrigerator motor, the birdsong through the open kitchen window.
After the morning round, we wash the dishes and take care of our chores. I may answer my email; he may check his stock trades. We run errands. We may play a little gin after lunch, but sometimes we’re lunching out, or if we’re home we are in the middle of planting tomatoes. But always after dinner, we clear the table and play into the night.
In many monasteries the Great Silence begins in the early evening and ends after Eucharist the following morning. We play gin rummy in a version of that dusky Silence. Our chairs creak as we lean in to draw a card, Dad sighs, I groan (he wins almost every hand), a car drones by, the three dogs bark next door. All this only heightens the silence.
You don’t need to talk with someone you love to be in communion. Men, especially, prefer a common task to a lot of talk; a nod of the head, a slight grunt, a sigh—these say enough. What matters most is the company, and the fact that what we are doing could not be done alone.
Most days I don’t sit for prayer when I am spending a week with my father. There’s too much to do in the early morning to get coffee on and breakfast cooked before eight o’clock. But it doesn’t really matter, because when I am here, I sit for hours hearing only my own breath and gazing occasionally over my suits of red and black at an old man who lives now only for love. Every time he gins, I win.
Wow, 95! Pam looks like you’re stuck with David for awhile! 😉 I remember my grandmother when she was in her mid-90’s…we would sit at her house in Spring Hope NC for hours (my grandfather died at 60) and would tell each other stories. She’d often be doing something sneaky (for a God-fearing woman) like not walking with her cane or something…and at the end of every story she would say “Now don’t tell your father” and we’d both bust out laughing. I’d tell a story next and I’d say “Now don’t tell your son” and we’d bust out laughing again. Thanks for triggering great memories David and enjoy the mantown grunts…they are invaluable
I could easily alter your line lengths, David, and you’d have on ode, an ode to the Old Man, the Patriarch, the Mayor of Andersonville. This one’s a keeper, as so many are. Dad, we love you with the strength of David’s prose.
Oh, David, thank you! My grandmother, Mommie, lived to be 95. Few words, deep thoughts. She raised five girls alone as my grandfather died very young. We did not play gin rummy but did listen to Helen Trent together. (You’re too young for Helen Trent and Our Gal Sunday!!) A great woman fondly remembered.
Bless the quietness of your days with your father. What a blessing. Ginny
Wonderful! Thank you for sharing your Dad with us, David, in the silence and in the love. And in the loving silence.
Thanks David. My dad and I spend time in silence at dinner, in the car. He comes from the – if you don’t have something to say keep your mouth shut – upbringing. Sometimes in that silence volumes are spoken.
I know that upbringing!