It Was Really Worth It

One of the things my family does when they get together is play cards.  It can be anything from poker to spades to Uno.  Sometimes we throw some chicken foot it there for good measure, but mostly it is cards.

Last year the girls and I went out after Thanksgiving day (Felicia stayed and went shopping….I dodged a bullet with that one!).  It was my brother Cully, his son Clay (Clint had gone to Oregon to visit his girl), my sister Jereny, myself, Faith and Alicia.  We spent the days riding, with my Dad doing a mini family clinic for all of us.   It was a lot of fun; we got to see No Fear Clay get on a young horse for the first time in the arena.  Sadly, there was no bucking involved….we were all very disappointed in the horse (maybe Clay wasn’t that disappointed).  But at night after supper, that’s where this story starts to get interesting. 

One this particular night we were all sitting around playing Uno, by house rules…so some of it was very inventive.  There was a lot of draw 2’s on top of other draw 2’s which forces the last person to total up the draw 2’s and draw that many.  All of this is in good fun and of course we were all ragging on each other’s ability to play the game and the last card played.  Really anything that could cause a ruckus was fair game!

Clay sat between Jereny and me, and was really taking some hits on the number of cards in his hand.  But, Jereny was leading (she plays cards like my Dad, it looks like she is losing and at the end of the night she has won) so she was fair game to pile on.  Now Clay holds his cards like Faith (she sat on my right), just kinda out there for everyone to see.  I could see neither of them had any draw 2’s and that Jereny needed more cards in her hand. So I slipped Clay one of my draw 2’s under the table and Faith another.  This left us with 3 in a row to pile onto Jereny.  Now it just so have happened to work out that Grandpa gave Alicia a draw 2, Alicia happened to have one in her hand so she played hers too.  I thought, “Wow, this could not have worked out better!”  As Faith played hers and me mine, Jereny started talking to Clay.  She was giving him all kinds of grief about playing his card, asking him “is it worth it, is it really worth it?”  Talking about what she was going to do to the colt he was riding the next day…on and on and on!

I finally told (maybe I promised, the memory is a little fuzzy) him it was worth it, go ahead and play.  I suppose since he is as much a daredevil as I was at that age, he played the card.  She ended up drawing about 10 cards and of course that blew her out of the lead. 

Once you get away with a play (cheat?) like we did you tend to get a little greedy.  So later on we tried it again.  Now remember, one person away you can get away with; but I was trying to slip it to Alicia (who was two people away).  As soon as she saw that card, she squealed on us!  My own flesh and blood…..honest….who would have thought!

Once we were busted, everybody piled on Clay and me (Faith got away by batting her eyes at her Grandpa).  You talk about high scores; Clays’ and my score had to be some kind of record.  I didn’t know you could have that many digits in a number for Uno scores.  Clay and I laughed so hard when Jereny drew those 10 cards that we decided that everything had to be worth it!

It was all in family fun and will be something that we will talk about in 20 years.  Of course the cheat and the repercussion will be a lot bigger by then.  But I suspect a lot of family stories get bigger and better with age, heck that is half the fun of remembering them!