Playing cards had always been enjoyable to me. I often played cards with my friends, introducing them to new games and beating them terribly. If there was one thing I was good at it had been playing cards. I played rummy and black jack, poker and every other game you could think of. For my birthday one year I had my friends come over and taught them how to play poker. We bid Oreo cookies instead of money and I quickly gained nearly all of the Oreos among my friends, once again proving that I was in the words of my grandfather a “card shark”.

My grandfather was the one who taught me how to play cards; I was six years old at the time. He was an experienced card player, having in his youth often played in Atlantic City. He firstly showed me all the different kinds of cards you could use. Some were decorated with hearts and clovers in the corners while others had large pictures of queens and kings illustrated upon them. After becoming familiar with the cards he taught me how to play my first card game; rummy. We played several games; while he won a majority of them, he would, sometimes let me win, which was not unlike him to do.

Soon playing cards became our thing among the family, and as I got older, the longer and more competitively we played. I had never seen my grandpa concentrate so hard as when he was playing cards. He would study the cards carefully as if each one were an extremely important contract that he was about to sign. Then he would swiftly rearrange his deck and slowly retrieve one to put down. I quickly picked up on his habits and made them my own. I was shuffling like him, rearranging my deck like him, studying my cards carefully like him, and soon enough I was almost as good as he was.

Whenever I was confronted with a box of cards in a store or on vacation I would usually buy them and bring them home to my grandpa. The look on his face when I gave them to him was worth the two or three dollars that they cost. His eyes would light up and a crinkled smile would appear on his elderly face. That was a smile I would do anything to see, though it didn’t demand much just a simple “hello” or “I love you” was enough to make my grandpa happier than the richest man on Earth. This was what was so special about my grandpa he didn’t care for materialistic things, and it didn’t take much to make him genuinely happy. He found beauty and happiness in life itself, something that is very rare to find these days.

Playing cards with my grandpa was something I loved to do. It was something I had always done. That’s just how it was. Like how some kids always went to sport practices I always played cards with my Pop. Even though I’ll never have the opportunity again, every time I pick up a deck of cards the first thing that pops into my head is his memory. Someday when I have kids I will teach them how to play cards. I’ll tell them about my grandfather and how he taught me how to play cards. I will tell him what a special man he was. Tell them about all the memories we shared through such a simple notion as playing cards.