Sechs on New Year’s Eve

By Heidi Croot

I was sitting across from my grandfather at the game table one New Year’s Eve as he clutched his belly in helpless laughter.

“Mein Bauch, mein Bauch!” he said, barely able to form words.

I was seventeen years old that night and learning euchre at the round pedestal table in my parents’ little brown bungalow. My German immigrant grandparents, then in their seventies, had made the two-hour train trip from Toronto to ring in the new year with us in our small bedroom commu...