Sardines

More Tales of a Tyler Place Youth
By Ted Tyler

Sardines are not to be found among the eighty-odd fish species in Lake Champlain. Nonetheless they, or more accurately “it”, was a frequent nighttime presence (and pleasure) from my early childhood on.

Sardines is a game – played inside and after it is quite dark. Like many games, it started with a deck of cards. Highest card drawn had the privilege of being the first hider.

The approved venue was a large house, the more floors and rooms and closets and nooks and beds to crawl under, the better. One with two sets of stairways and a fireplace with a smidgeon of light – perfect. In those days Farmhouse Up and Down were one unit occupied by the Wristons – and that was often the locus, Farmhouse West being included in later years. When the Old Inn (the Franklin House) was purchased near the end of World War II – four stories including the huge attic, staircases at either end – it was baptized with a (completely terrifying) game of Sardines.

Getting back to the rules of the game, almost all light in the building was extinguished. Everyone but the hider would retreat into a bathroom and stay there, giving the hider (who after all, had to navigate in the dark) sufficient time to secrete herself. After three minutes or so, the group would stumble forth.

Now as you have surmised, this game was like hide and seek in the dark, but there was more to it than that. True enough, whoever found the hider first got to be the hider for the next round – so it was quite competitive. But when the hider was found, you didn’t announce it. Quite the contrary, you ever-so-quietly slid under the bed (or wherever) next to the hider and waited for the next searcher to find the two of you, and so on and so on until one poor soul might be left wandering around the house wondering where everyone had disappeared to. Actually this last happened rarely, because by the time six or seven people were crammed together under the bed, the giggling got sufficiently intense so only the stone deaf couldn’t find you.

Three short anecdotes of “Sardines games I especially remember” – in chronological order:

1. Like many of our games, Sardines was “family” and for all ages. Once when I was five years old or so, I was the hider. My six foot plus uncle, Deke Wriston, assisted me in hiding and placed me seven feet up on top of a large wardrobe. No one ever found me.

2. At law school age we played a game in the old Inn where the rooms had twelve foot ceilings. I dreamed up a perfect place to hide – on top of a door in one of the guest rooms where there was enough space to crouch and (because the door was in a corner of the room) I could balance myself with a hand on each of two walls. Searchers could enter and leave the room (as long as they didn’t close the door completely shut) and I could simply swing with the door. It worked great – but (there must have been some connection) an hour or so later I was being driven to a Burlington hospital at 70 miles per hour (that was fast then) with my first and only kidney stone.

3. Fast forward to just twenty years ago and the stone house in Swanton. Cathy and I had recently begun our relationship. My niece Pixita’s connection with Luke was new as well, or at least we didn’t know each other well. It was Christmas time and a game of Sardines had been underway, from which Cathy and I snuck out and went to bed. A short while later Luke opened the door, felt around a bit and got in bed with us. We chatted a bit (quietly of course). Luke became silent for a moment and then said, “You aren’t playing this game, are you?”