When we were watching It's a Wonderful Life last week, I was amused, as I always am, when George as a boy proudly tells little Mary that he's been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society. That's what it says on the letter when you subscribe to the magazine, that you're nominated for membership in the society. As a little kid, George Bailey thought it was way cool that he was a member of such an august organization.
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut invented a whole lot of words that were part of a religion he created on a tropical island that existed only in his imagination. One of these words is granfalloon. I can't quote the definition exactly, but it describes organizations that are entirely constructs of society and really meaningless, but from which people derive a whole lot of false pleasure because it puffs them up and makes them think they're important. The two examples he gives in the book are the Elks, and Republican Party.
Why do I have granfalloons on the brain today? Because today I got in the mail my first membership newsletter, my first "official publication", for the National Mah Jongg League. (There's no actual website at that link, by the way, just an ad for their upcoming Mah Jongg Cruise.)
Where on earth do I start in on Jah Jongg? The popular perception, I think, is that it's a game played by little old Jewish ladies. Heaven knows, that's my perception of it, although I know it's played in China, where it originated, as a fast-paced and vicious gambling game. I only have it a little-old-ladies framework, although I do have a set of my own. I don't know how to play, though.
The background. My mother, of course, played Mah Jongg, starting back in the fifties, if not earlier, when it was played a lot by the young-married set. They had weekly games in the afternoon, or sometimes in the evening. Each week it would be held in a different home, five women in a Mah Jongg group. Why five? It was explained to me that four people could play at once; there were five so one could rotate out each hand. Huh? Made no sense to my little girl brain. If you need four, why don't you just have four and they can play the whole time?
I was fascinated when it was my mother's turn to host Mah Jongg night. I would help her set up the card table in the living room, put the special cover over the table, and lay out the game equipment. There are long racks to hold the tiles, one for each player, and then, magic! The Mah Jongg tiles! Cool little ivory rectangles with pretty colored little codes on them, which meant nothing to me, but I loved them! I could build with them, like blocks, match the colors, the numbers. I think there are 144 in a set. My mother would be setting out the cakes and coffee on the dining room table. There was an ashtray at each corner of the Mah Jongg table. I was shooed upstairs to bed before the ladies arrived. But sometimes, I would peek from the top of the stairs, and I would see ...
Five women in a cloud of cigarette smoke, four of them snapping tiles down on the table and calling out the magic words: One crack! Two bam! Soap! While the fifth hovered around them, observing the hands they were playing and eating cake. I assumed that the rotating fifth player got time off so she could eat. But I think in fact the non-participating player got to bet on the outcome of the game, who would win. The bets were kept with little chips with holes in their centers that stacked on rods at one end of the tile-rack. At the end of the evening, they would tally up the chips and find out who was the "winner." I think that in a fabulously good week, the winner might come out with $2.00.
Mah Jongg, I believe, is essentially like a card game, where there are different suits and numbers, and you need to create hands of different sets and runs. Game play includes drawing tiles and discarding, and winning is when you call out "Mah Jongg!" and display your hand. It's a lot like gin rummy, I guess, except that the hands are so complicated that it's very hard to come up with a winning hand yourself. To alleviate this dilemma -- that the game is too hard for its participants to play, at least while they're eating and smoking -- they join the Mah Jongg League, which sends them a folding card that outlines all the good hands for this year. Why they change it every year, I have no idea.
I loved Mah Jongg night. I loved the excitement of the ladies talking and staying up late in our house, and I loved falling asleep to the clicking and snapping of the tiles. I loved hearing the occasional laughter break out among them.
I've never had the time to learn to play, although some years ago, I told my mother I wanted to and she got me a Mah Jongg set. They're not easy to find. According to her, the only way she could get one was to put word out among people she knew (that is, the little old Jewish ladies underground) who went to Florida for the winter that she was looking for one, and sooner or later, one would turn up. Turn up? Indeed. Sooner or later, a little old lady in Florida would die, and in disbursing her possessions, her family would want to sell the Mah Jongg set, and voila, it would return to New Jersey in the spring. This is the god's honest truth of how I got my Mah Jongg set. It isn't quite as nice as my mother's "new" one, which she bought in the early 1960s, and which my sister has, but it's way nicer than her original set, which was a mess, and did indeed become little building blocks for me to play with when the new set came along. I lost most of the tiles, and then the rest of it got thrown away.
I'm a member of the National Mah Jongg League, with a game set in an incredibly heavy little suitcase to prove it. This year's game card should arrive in the mail any day now. How did I get to be a member? I found Mah Jongg cards, going back years, in my mother's dresser drawer when she died, and then a reminder to renew her membership for the coming year arrived. I took it home, called them, and asked them to continue her membership account -- probably an original -- in my name. (By the way, for the cost of the dues, they print one flimsy card and one cheap newsletter, help people replace missing tiles when needed, and then give the rest to charity. They're particular supporters of organ transplant charities.)
I've also kept up my father's membership, in my name, in his Army reunion group, as have many of the original members' offspring. Granfalloons. Meaningless, really. Sure feels like the right thing to do, though.
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I'm watching Dr. Phil
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