Ah, summer! It is the season of moral turpitude, a time in which normally industrious people seek the pleasures of sloth and idleness (sleeping late, lying in hammocks), gluttony (unguarded bowls of potato chips), and envy (oceanfront real estate listings, someone else’s gleaming sailboat).
And then there is the peculiar mix of greed, pride and wrath that comes in the form of an after-dinner game of pick-up-sticks, a favorite pursuit of these long, languid, lotus-eating evenings. “Hah! It moved,” someone says, pointing.
“No, it didn’t.”
“Yes, it did.”
“I didn’t touch it! Guys, you were watching — I didn’t touch it.”
“You did. You picked up the green one, and the red one moved.”
“That was the table.”
“Well, if you bump the table, that counts.”
“But I didn’t!”
“Someone did.”
“So? It wasn’t me!”
Just as diplomacy is war by other means, pick-up-sticks is another form of character assassination. And it’s surely the most efficient method ever devised to get a group of children to violate the commandment against bearing false witness.
“Cheat, cheat, never beat!”
“I’m not cheating!”
“You are so!”
In the game, one person “drops” a little cluster of colored sticks so that they land in a heap. The next player tries to extract as many sticks as possible without disturbing any of the others, even slightly.
A rough gesture, or the gentlest bump of the table (see above), can move the sticks, which ends a person’s turn — provided, that is, that everyone can agree that the sticks did or did not move, and that it is or isn’t the next person’s turn. Which, it seems, everyone can’t.
“You jolted it, stinker!”
“I did not! And don’t call me stinker!”
Other table games don’t seem as effective in cranking tempers from mild to boiling. Nor do most other parlor activities tempt young players to make such quick and extravagant claims of deceit.
Monopoly, for instance, is more likely to bore children into torpor than to bring them to each other’s throats. Scrabble can excite the sedate — especially if you get a player who tries the old “but in our family we use acronyms” ploy — but generally moves slowly enough that ill humor subsides almost before it has a chance to rise. With dominoes, the math is inarguable; you either get the points or you don’t, and everyone can see.
Pick-up-sticks is different. The game requires certain personal qualities — restraint, honor, and a self-sacrificing generosity toward others — that are not exactly summoned to full strength during the dissipated months of summer vacation.
“Did!”
“Didn’t!”
“Did!”
“Didn’t!”
“Aaagh!”
Come September, there won’t be incendiary games of pick-up-sticks in the evenings anymore. Instead of potato chips and yacht envy, we’ll resume the strictures of normal life: vegetables, homework and early-to-bed. It sounds placid and disciplined, and preferable to board game bickering, yet summer is its own kind of bliss and I don’t suppose anyone will be much relieved when it ends.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
