I taught my twelve-year-old granddaughter, Clara, how to play cribbage. The first two rounds we played were full-disclosure games because we laid our cards face up on the table. It’s the easiest way to teach someone to play. I taught her strategies for tossing cards into the crib, how to maximize her chance for a better hand, and how to peg points while preventing her opponent from doing the same. I taught her how to count the pairs, runs, and combinations of fifteens. Cribbage is a complicated game, but that’s what makes it fun.

I learned to play cribbage when I was nineteen years old. I was a bartender in a small unincorporated town, population 350. One of my customers asked me to play cribbage. I told him I didn’t know how. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to learn because when customers come in and it’s slow, they’re going to expect you to play.”

I’d grown up eight hours away in a metropolitan area, and I’d never heard of cribbage.

The customer grabbed the cribbage board and a deck of cards off a ledge from behind the bar. “I’ll teach you,” he said. He placed the pegs in their starting holes and shuffled the cards. I carried over a barstool and sat down in front of him but stayed behind the bar. After all, should another customer have shown up, I might’ve had to pour a beer, mix a whiskey-7, or pop a top on a soda. He taught me well, and I played many games of cribbage with him and other bar patrons, especially on quiet winter days and nights.

Shortly after Clara and I started our third game, I asked, “Do you want to play without us seeing each other’s cards?”

“Sure!” She smiled and her eyes sparkled, excited that Nana felt she was ready to be in charge of her own hand. She did well and quickly caught on to counting her hands, but luck plays a part in cribbage, and I had better cards. Yet none of that mattered. We laughed and celebrated our high-scoring hands. We laughed and mocked our low-scoring hands, saying, “two, four, and there ain’t no more,” or “I got nineteen.” (Nineteen equals nothing because it’s not possible to score nineteen points in a cribbage hand.) I almost skunked her in one of the games, but she managed to avoid the stink of getting beat by 31 points or more. And we laughed about that too. Both of us like to play cards and board games, but neither of us is bothered by losing. There is always another game to be played.

Clara and I played on the same cribbage board I used when I taught my grandma Olive to play cribbage. I have two other boards, but I liked knowing that Clara and I were touching the same pegs and moving them along the same holes on the same board Grandma Olive and I used forty-five years ago.

When I was eighteen, I moved in with my grandparents, George and Olive, and lived with them for almost three years. Grandma Olive and I didn’t always agree about how I should live my life. She believed I should sing in the church choir and attend Sunday sermons. She believed I should be present at the dinner table for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She believed I should be home before midnight. She believed I should have a better class of friends. She believed I should iron my shirts instead of wearing them wrinkled.

I believed Sunday mornings were for sleeping in. I believed if a friend said, “Let’s go swimming” or “Let’s play tennis,” skipping lunch or dinner was no big deal. I believed being home by midnight was for Cinderella. I believed my friends were wonderful. And I believed the heat from my body would smooth out most of the wrinkles in my shirts.

But I loved Grandma Olive, and I knew she loved me and worried about me. And because neither of us liked conflict, our disagreements were soft-spoken, thirty-second exchanges of point and counterpoint, in which neither of us would change our minds. Then I would leave the room. And she would exhale a heavy sigh.

When I wasn’t working or with my friends, I liked spending time with Grandma in her kitchen. She taught me how to make an angel food cake (lots of sifting and gentle folding) and Amish sugar cookies (pressed with the bottom of a cut-glass crystal sugar bowl). She taught me how to play Shanghai rummy, which used two decks of cards and had increasingly complicated hands of sets and runs, which players had to attain to score points.

Grandma often heard me talk about playing cribbage with customers when I bartended. “I wish I knew how to play,” she would say, so I bought a cribbage board. One evening as we finished up the supper dishes, I offered to teach her how to play. I can still picture her standing in her slightly remodeled 1940s kitchen, wearing her patterned apron trimmed in red rickrack, one of its pockets bulging with an ever-present handkerchief. She teared up, smiled, and said, “Oh, yes!”

Grandma Olive loved me even if drove her crazy, and I loved her even if she didn’t understand my generation.

I lived with my grandparents for nearly three years. I thought I was easy to have around, and in many ways I was. But looking back, I realize that my grandparents, especially Grandma Olive, worried about me. They’d already raised three children, so having their eighteen-year-old granddaughter come to live with them during their golden years wasn’t ideal. Grandpa, who was never a talker and still worked at his gas station six days a week, would remain an enigma to me. But Grandma and I came to know and appreciate one another, most of time.

So sometimes when the baking and cooking and dishes were done, Grandma Olive and I would sit at the old wooden kitchen table covered in oilcloth and play Shanghai rummy or cribbage. We talked and laughed, and forgot about our disagreements, neither of us caring if we won or lost the game.

A few years after I moved out of my grandparents’ house, Grandpa George died, and Grandma Olive developed dementia. She and I couldn’t play cards anymore.

Comes a time when there isn’t another game to be played.