Dominoes (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Shall we play a game?

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with D for Dominoes.

I spent a while debating whether to spell "dominoes" with the "e" or without it. I even went to Amazon to look up some games, but they were both ways, so that wasn't helpful. Do you know that dominoes come in colors now (if you prefer)? Kind of cool. I might get some... for the grandkids. I decided that I liked the "e" because it goes with potatoes and tomatoes. English is so random. The dictionary says that a domino was originally a French word for a black cape that a priest wore over his white surplice. After 1750, in both England and France, the word referred to a hooded cloak with a mask that people wore at carnivals or masquerades. I do recall this from romance novels, where all sorts of shenanigans occurred while people wore masks. The game pieces appeared around the same time in both countries.

Anyway. My parents played a lot of games with me (again, I thought this was what everyone did, but it turns out that some families never played dominoes or gin rummy or Scrabble, etc.). We liked to use a double set of dominoes to "make things interesting." I have sweet albeit fuzzy memories of playing dominoes on the floor with my mom (sometimes with my dad too) while listening to Johnny Cash records. Or the Doors or the Zorba soundtrack or Swan Lake. Very eclectic mix of music! This was when we lived in apartments in New York. After we had a house with more room, we would work on large puzzles while watching Creature Feature movies.

My mom and I also played a lot of gin rummy, Scrabble, and regular and Chinese checkers. It's hard to find peeps who like Chinese checkers, especially the way we played it with the whole board (circle) filled up. We each had three triangles of marbles to move, which caused a huge traffic jam. So fun! We played a lot of hangman, plus there was this weird game of drawing one line at a time to make squares, which you would then initial. The person who initialed the most squares won. It was a very simple game where all you needed was a pencil and a sheet of paper. What the heck is that even? Does it have a name? My dad taught me to play chess, though I never became good at it. 

I still love games and regularly attend game nights with friends.