Dad jokes and card games
Owl good things come to an end
The “dad joke” isn’t always a pun. Sure, if a bird of prey escaped the New York Zoo, and you respond, “owl good things come to an end,” that’s a dad joke. But a dad joke is not a form but a vibe: the fact of having told a joke is more important than being funny. “Hey kid,” it says, “I’m here.”
I remember a while ago, years, half-decades, I was eating soup with grad students and went on a tirade about board games. (Specifically, Cards Against Humanity, which does continue to strain my generosity.) I’d more or less cribbed the rant from my high school English teacher: Life is short and we are adults. We can connect with each other. We can talk. We have our own ideas and wits. Why stop real connection to push plastic pieces around a board?
The host, a one-time Montana ranch wife who absolutely loved scrabble, looked hurt. Who knows how many winters she’d spent snowed in on the prairie, with what sounded like a stranger for a husband, comforted by a game? I apologized, and reconsidered.
Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga, posits that the nature of humankind is not thinking, but playing. Play makes us human, drives creativity, inspires discovery. We set rules and explore competitively within them. My teacher could divide games from talk, but good conversation dances and plays. What is wit but toying with the logic of language? If I’m happy to handle a rugby ball, why not a top hat and dice?
Unlike in my ambitious 20s, I have free time now. I’m no longer greedy to look up from school books and unplanned revolutions to gulp human connection. I’m also much less confident anyone needs to hear my ideas—which may dim my curiosity to develop ideas by hearing anyone else’s. But I do value people showing up.
A month ago, Giovanna had a visa interview we’d been anticipating for the six months since we last saw each other. She carpooled four hours to the nearest US consulate, and waited with documents that proved she would return to Brazil. After a five minute interview, they rejected her.
I think I knew in my heart it meant we would break up. I couldn’t financially or emotionally keep doing long distance. I hadn’t seen her in half a year. I struggled to remember whether we shared a bond worth 2-5 years of red tape and Skype. My situational calculus had plenty other factors to consider, and I fell into one of those annoying funks where you have to recount the same mental dilemma to everyone who asks “how are you?” I drove to Forest Park and took long pensive walks back to square one. Robby got a hint that I felt rough, and immediately picked me up in his old beaten truck for dinner. I sat in the corner of the kitchen, keeping them company while Robby helped Andria cook spaghetti.
A week and a surprisingly cheap 30-hour flight later, I sat across from Giovanna, no longer my girlfriend, at a beachside bar in Natal. Gio and I drank passionfruit caipirinhas and played chess. We never had much to say—it was one of those memories I needed to recall in person. Was it comfortable silence, or a metastasizing absence that would torture me into my 80s? A fiancée visa was all we had left, and how do you gamble on marriage based on 9 weeks in person and a lot of texts?
Setup the facts one way, and a choice looks obvious.
The next day we bought a deck of cards and learned buraco. The server brought gin. The band left before we did.
A guy once told me he bow-hunted just to hang with his brother-in-law. He said he used to follow football, and then one preseason his wife asked, “who’s that player?”
He replied, “I don’t know, but by the end of the season I will.” Learning a whole league’s worth of characters fall after fall made him realize how much time he’d spent watching football. He promptly quit to retake those hours. “I guess I play more Call of Duty now,” he mused.
I see Mike, and his best friend Jesse. A few years ago, Jesse survived cancer with his wife Julia and Mike at his side. Like me and Robby, who I met in 7th grade art class, Mike and Jesse have known each other since childhood. They are Broncos fans, and watch football some Sunday afternoons. Even when Mike watches alone, he tracks their shared fantasy league.
Last night I dug up some cards.
If you know someone long enough, you run out of things to say. Maybe a friend plays with ideas in ways that suit your mind, or maybe you prefer insults or anecdotes, but it still falls quiet. The words run low or run in circles. We have to fill the time between now and never somehow. One of the best ways is together.
Now that I plant peppers and birdwatch, (it was always foreshadowed) no pursuit seems superior to another. We’re all just playing, pruning, punning, working. Love is wasting time. Each slap of the cards says, “Hey kid. I’m here.”