Cards!

Card games. I know some love them, and I played enough poker, blackjack, and even bridge when I was young that I least had a bit of pleasure from them. Then came my time with my father-in-law – the Cap’n. He loved to play cribbage so much that it was a nightly event when sailing on board his ketch, Pysche. Or at home. My first wife didn’t like playing the game, nor did his wife. that left me to be the one who played the game with him.
If I protested, there would be a protracted session of whining, guilt-tripping, and protestations. Poor “Daddy would be so disappointed.” I do not like the game, and I never played more than a barely adequate hand. This enraged the Cap’n and led to my wife sitting in and offering me tips on how to play—but she herself would never play.
On cruises, I would dread the evening coming. I loved handling the sails, learning pilotage, and maintaining the ketch. But with the setting of the sun would come cribbage. If I could beg out on the pretext of an anchor watch or any stupid excuse (after all, I did learn something in the Navy!) I did.
When the divorce came along, the Cap’n seized several thousand dollars worth of my tools and blasphemed my name in the community. But I no longer had to play cribbage or listen to bad advice on how to play the game. Give me a chalice of rotgut Navy “fish juice” to drink. Just don’t wave that damned board in front of me.

It was years before I could look at a cribbage Board without shuddering. And it was even more years before I could force the damned word from between my lips. If forced to describe the game, I explained it as a card game where you moved the little pegs around the board. Shudder.

While in therapy, I cracked my therapist up with some descriptions of evenings playing cribbage. He apologized and asked for forgiveness. I replied that it was funny if you were not part of the idiocy. Smiling, he suggested that I had a mild form of PTSD from the experience.

Talking about it this way is part of working through my issues. But I could imagine someone who hated cribbage being assigned to a cabin in hell where the game was always cribbage.
Mea culpa, Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa!!!!!