Dinner has been over for hours, the kids are playing hide-and-go-seek. I am 8 years old and hiding beneath the kitchen table as the adults engage in card-playing. This is how get-togethers are spent.

Euchre is a rite of passage. I can still remember getting my nose out of joint one summer when, on our annual vacation "Up North", the adults taught Thad, a cousin with the better part of ten years on me in age, how to play. "Fine," I thought, and spent the rest of the afternoon coloring.

—With only the blue crayons!

My protest and altogether obvious statement somehow went unnoticed. It would be years before my turn would come.

My parents decided, one stale summer's night, that their children ought to know how to play more than just Go Fish. [Do you know, Crazy Eights is essentially Uno without the Spanish!? Wild.]

Then, there was Euchre.

Miles doesn't play Euchre. He plays Spades, Hearts, and a rousing hand of Old Maid. I found it pert-neer impossible to find a Euchre player in amongst the Southerners. Charity, my mother-in-law's friend, the New Yorker, proudly declared that this was because it was a "Yankee Game". Something to do with the long winters and boredom, she said.

Needless to say, it had been awhile—and when I say "awhile" I mean tens of thousands of hours. Well, yesterday we played. Mom partnered with me, and we went to battle against Charlie and Brenda. We were poised to lose, as is our custom.

The crescendo of Debbie's snore from the bedroom accompanied our first win, and the good-natured belittling began. "B*tches," Brenda muttered, and Mom and I began reaching over the table to give each other high-fives after every point, cheering, "Goooooo—B*tches!" Brenda looked at Charlie. Charlie looked at Brenda. They looked at their beer and thought, "I've either had too much to drink...or much, much too little." And, on went their next round of alcohol.

They won the second game...and Charlie, though he had been using the term against yours truly throughout the entire tournament, proclaimed unto me just then, "Take that you little TROLLOP!"

Mom, high on silliness much like myself, volleyed, in her ditsiest Farah Fawcett voice, "Well, you little bushwhacker!" I bet that really stung. Thank goodness she only releases her venom but rarely.

Meanwhile, I was thinking satisfactorily, "A trollop?" With the palm of my right hand, I patted up at the bottom of my hair and giggled. Aloud, "A trollop! I just feel so free! A trollop! I ought to wear the low-cut black dress when we go out tonight!" Another giggle. Another hair pat. My eyelashes were batting wildly, ostentatiously, flirtatiously, as Brenda got up and presented her partner with another beer.

Mom and I won the third and final game of the set, which surprised us more than anyone else. We, unrehearsed and eerily, launched into a cover of Cher's "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" entitled, "Bush—wack'rs, Trollops and Thieves". [It was uncanny how we squeezed 'bushwhackers' into two syllables. You shoulda been there.]

It was sobriety at its best.

Drink it up, people.