The word canasta has not popped up in my circles in a long time, but continual conversations about that card game craze of the 1950s are vivid in my boyhood memories.
My mother and a lot of other ladies in our paper mill community were obsessed with canasta. When they were not playing it, they were talking about it on the phone and over back yard fences.
On Saturdays when the canasta was scheduled for our house, my mother polished the wood floors, dusted the furniture, cleaned the windows and had the hall bathroom shining and smelling good.
We were all banned from the premises when the canasta ladies were coming over. That didn’t bother my dad, who was happy to spend those days at the pool hall.
But it was a hardship for my brother and me. We were warned not to “track dirt” in the house or to step foot in the bathroom from the time it was cleaned until all the ladies left.
When we asked my mother what we were supposed to do if we had the urge to go the bathroom, she always responded that we would “just have to hold it.”
Having to hold it created lifelong bathroom issues for me. I just can’t make myself use a bathroom that is freshly scrubbed and sparkling and still has the strong scent of cleaning products.
It’s such a delicate subject that I have never been able to ask my brother about it, but I’m sure he has also been brainwashed to just hold it instead of messing up a nice clean bathroom.
Looking back, canasta games were a big production. My mother made things like chicken ala king and tuna fish sandwiches, and she usually did one of her famous chocolate cakes with white icing.
If a couple of the ladies were on a diet, there was a chance that my brother and I might get a piece of that cake with the frosting that got crisp and crunchy after it sat a while.
I remember canasta games took two decks of cards and there were four players to a table. My mother usually had two tables of ladies when she hosted the games.
It was hard to shuffle two decks of cards, so she ordered one of those hand-cranked card shufflers from Sears and later got one that operated on batteries. There was also a clear plastic card tray that ladies could turn like a lazy susan to draw their cards.
The games would get loud. We heard shouts a couple of houses away of “Dammit, she went out” and even sharper exclamations. Our preacher at Calvary Baptist didn’t approve of card games, and he would certainly have frowned on some of the language.
Canasta must have taken a long time, because the sandwiches my mother gave us to tide us over until we could go home and eat wore off a good while before the games ended.
It was also impossible for us to “just hold it” as long as the canasta lasted, so we were fortunate that there were a lot of trees and bushes in our neighborhood.
The ladies didn’t view canasta as gambling and would never have considered playing poker or some other scandalous game like that. But they gave costume jewelry and other trinkets to weekly winners and kept a running score for bigger year-end prizes.
My mother was so captivated by canasta for a while that she wanted me, my dad and brother to learn the game so she would have a built-in foursome to play any time the mood struck her.
But canasta had its own strange lingo and rules. Terms like making melds, frozen piles, cards in the same rank, concealed hands, dirty canasta and all that were like a foreign language to us.
She acknowledged that a lot of study would be needed for us to learn canasta. I figured if you had to study something that hard, it should be to become a lawyer or engineer.
So my mother remained the only one in the family who could play canasta, and even she quit it after a while and took up bridge.
Maybe she saw the decline in popularity coming for canasta. I never hear about anybody around here playing it any more.
That’s good, because young boys should not be locked out of their own homes and bathrooms and have to hold it while their mothers play canasta.