My parents have played bridge forever. Mom was
in a weekly bridge club (and Mah Jongg for accuracy and transparency sake) as
long as I can recall; mom & dad would often spend a Saturday night going to
dinner and playing bridge with friends. I never really learned the game, nor
picked it up. But bridge-playing and its lingo were always around the house.
One of the ingrained family memories
concerned one of the dogs they had (when, long before I came around, they were
dog-people, prior to the enlightened conversion to being cat-people, author’s
opinion), and specifically its name. You may know that in playing bridge, each
hand has one suit that is declared the wild card, which is called trump. A card
of that suit *trumps* even higher face cards of the others. When no such suit
is declared, or employed in a given hand, it’s called “no trump.” Obviously,
when mom and dad got a new dog, a puppy I presume, it was yet untrained and
early on did things that he shouldn’t, or that they didn’t want. Immediately,
the story goes, they had to repeat, “No!” to it over and over, even before
finding a suitable name. As avid card players, “No!” quickly became, “No,
Trump!” and hence the dog’s moniker emerged. Years later, they still invoked
the dog when chiding us.
Well, today the plea of “No, Trump!” has
taken on a much different, more significant meaning. I’ve still not learned to
enjoy the game of bridge; and if a certain someone is going to declare war by
saying Secretary Clinton is merely playing the #womancard, well then, #DealMeIN as “No,
Trump!” is the card I’m happy to play.
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