My dad was the eldest of 5, and the only one to move (slightly) away.  The rest of his siblings all lived within roughly 15 miles of each other and I had loads of cousins.  When I was growing up, these cousins would all have massive family birthday parties.  One of my favourites was when it was my cousin Sam’s birthday as her parents would rent out this community room at the park.  Her birthday is in February and the party room was right next to the skating pond.  I would spend hours out on that pond, imagining I was a famous figure skater.  I could skate forwards and backwards and even got to a point where I could do a sort of half turn.  The thrill and risk of leaving the ice for just a fraction of a second before landing on my opposite skate was exhilarating.

My uncle Brian would help organize us into age brackets for various indoor games too.  We’d drop clothespins into a jug or run relays with a spoon full of water, trying to fill up a cup.  Somehow the relay always ended with the final person needing to peel and eat a banana.  Once you opened your mouth wide to prove to uncle Brian that the banana was, indeed, consumed, you were declared the winner.

Once the games were over, people would settle in.  My dad and his brothers, cousins, and other men would play cards.  Somehow there were never any women who played, only the men.  They always played Sheepshead, which I thought was a very funny name for a game.  I was thankful there were never any sheep slaughtered in the game as I’d just keep picturing a bloody head of a sheep mounted on a stake and getting paraded around the birthday party.  The men bet with quarters and they’d bribe the little cousins to bring them more beers from the nearby cooler so they didn’t have to get up from the game.  You could earn a quarter per trip, which was valuable in the 80s.

I never did learn to play Sheepshead, but if I had, you better believe I would have pulled up a chair and joined the game.