Queue

Today I found myself thinking about the word queue and how great it is.

It's great because it's just one letter, really, and onto this poor unsuspecting q are added a rather extraneous u and e. And then, after that, for reasons I can't explain, another u and e! Why? It must be because it's British. That's the only explanation I can think of.

Because it is a British word, I'm sure of it. I might just think this because my countrymen will say they're standing in a line instead of in a queue, but I think it's also because the queue is a phenomenon unto itself here in a way that lines never are for the people who stand in them.

I mean, last week I read about some guy who beat up another guy he recognized as having recently commited the cadrinal sin of Queue Jumping. Imagine! He just saw this guy in the street and pummeled him until he had to pay a couple hundred quid in reparations. I don't think that sort of thing happens where people stand in lines.

But such fervent dedication to an ideal like queuing sounds very British to me. Especially when you add in the extraneous-vowel factor...

Clock

A few days ago this house (Andrew's parents' house, that is, which is where my Internet connectivity takes place for the moment) was full of people ranging from twenty years younger than me to twenty years older than me. But then all of a sudden all of them were gone, even Andrew, and he's usually around here when I am so that even if I have nothing else to do I can go bother him.

But everybody happened to be gone, for a little while, except me. And as I didn't even have a book with me, I was looking around for something to do. I spied a deck of cards and sat down cross-legged on the living room floor with it. I didn't feel like bothering with the regular boring old kind of soltaire, though, so I tried to think of some others.

My grandma knows about a million, it seemed, and she taught me some. Vague bits of rules from two or three of them still run through my head if I try very hard to remember them, but there's only one I remember entirely, and as I realized that I was already arranging the cards in a circle.

It's the simplest, which may have something to do with why I remember it. It's also the one I played the most, I think, which probably doesn't hurt either. We always called it the clock game, for reasons that shall become obvious.

The cards are arranged face down in twelve piles of four, each pile to represent a number of the clock, with the remanining four cards in the deck stacked in the middle. You play by picking up some card (at random, at least that's how I remember it) and sliding it, face up, under ths pile of facedown cards at that number of the clock. Aces go at 1, deuces at 2, threes at 3, and so on. And naturally jacks are 11 and queens are 12. The kings go in the middle.

The point of the game, if it has one, is to get all the "clock face" cards in their places before the four kings show up. I don't know if I realized this at the time, but last weekend I soon noticed that this is nearly impossible. I spectulated on the possibility of the real point being to teach little kids where the numbers on a clock are. Because it certainly does seem to enforce that; after a bit of this I'm picking up cards, looking at them, and sliding them into their respective piles almost without thinking about it.

I seem to remember playing this with my brother when the point of the game was to see who could finish soonest. That sounds like the sort of thing we'd do; I know we used to play double solitaire, where you play off each other's aces at the top. My grandma and my mom have told me stories of my mom and her sisters, when they were young, getting vicious in their games of double solitaire. I smile, imagining them fighting over who gets to be the one to play her three of diamonds or whatever.

The game doesn't require much thought, so I spent my time listening to the songs on the radio and thinking about my grandma and the other times I've played this game, all of them years ago now. For some reason pastimes like solitaire games always seemed great at Grandma and Grandpa's, even though I never would've sat still for that at home most of the time. I used to play it a lot, too, on the summer vacations up north with my brother and parents and grandparents, especially when it was cold or rainy outside.

So I thought of Big Sand Lake, where most of those vacations took place, and the excruciatingly long journey (six hours! next to my brother!) it took to get there. I thought about the pancakes my brother and I would always ask for, for breakfast, every single time we spent the night at our grandparents' house. If I have more than coffee and a roll now when I'm there, you better believe it's those pancakes I ask for. They're absolutely the best I've ever tasted. I don't know why that's so but I'm sure it is. For a long time my brother didn't want Grandma to put his on the griddle; he thought she burned them. So she let him cook them himself and half the time when he was satisfied with their done-ness he'd poke one and it'd still be raw in the middle.

I thought of all this because of a silly little card game. That's the sort of thing I do. And, mostly, I think it's a good thing.