My goddaughter is eleven years old. Every week, she and I spend an afternoon and evening together, usually involving an outing—to a museum, or the library, or a huge model of the largest estuary on the west coast, more frequently referred to as San Francisco Bay. But sometimes we just hang out. When her mom’s in a pinch, I’ll take her brother and sister too.

Yesterday was one of those pinches. I’d had a logy morning. Sluggish and drowsy, I wandered between the laptop, the coffee maker, the laundry, and the toaster. I didn’t write so much as re-arrange words. At 11 a.m., I considered the failure implicit in taking a nap before lunch.

I was happy for the distraction of three children. I picked them up at 3:20 outside their summer school, shutting off “The Lehrer Report” as they clambered in. Clare had the front seat last time, so I gave it to John. Kate, at twelve, couldn’t care less about shotgun dibs and settles right in to the back seat with a book.

Instantly my car was full of eager voices, happy questions, energy. Was my nephew, home from university for the summer, at the house? Had he really dyed his hair the colors of his dorm? Would the cat come out from under the bed this time? What would we were going to do at my house?

On the half-hour drive across town, we discussed free speech (in one of Clare’s summer classes, Mock Trial, the students learn about recent cases such as those involving Terri Schiavo, a 13-year-old cancer patient whose parents didn’t want him to have chemotherapy, and students wearing black armbands). We talked about why cats knead with their front paws, and how even spayed cats have nipples. Kate touched on the role of the gods in ancient Greece, and John asked what deity aliens believe in.

When we got home, they all took off their shoes inside my front door. The cat slunk away under the bed. I sliced up a few apples. Kate picked up the Beatles Anthology and began reading. John and Clare sprawled on the rug to play Pick-Up Sticks. It’s a rug, but not too plush, so the sticks don’t get buried in the pile or tangled in loops. And, as Clare pointed out, they don’t roll the way they do on the wooden table top.

I first played Pick-Up Sticks when I was eight, during a summer we spent in a small house on Oahu’s North Shore. Only for a month, but the layout and details of that house are imprinted in my mind, from the ubiquitous rattan floor coverings to the slatted pebbled-plastic window louvers my mother angled throughout the day to take advantage of the trade winds. My father came for a week, but the rest of the time my brother and I were there alone with mom, piling in the jumpy VW bug to drive to the local store for hamburger meat and soft squishy buns, fresh pineapples, papayas. We played on the beach with the local kids, our arms and legs going pink then brown, our hair whitening, our skin laced with salt. Geckos scampered along the walls and stuck to lamps.

One afternoon, we were told to put on clothes (real clothes, not our bathing suits and T-shirts) and comb our hair. The VW lurched along the road—Mom had never learned to drive a stick shift and, after that summer, never again tried—until we arrived at a house where an old lady lived.

We were welcomed inside and tried to sit politely while Mom and the lady chatted. I was eight and supposed to know enough to mimic my mother’s posture—back straight, thighs and knees pressed together, feet tucked under—but I was only eight and wanted to slump and droop from the torpor of sitting in this house where an old lady lived alone. And then our hostess broke her attention away from our mother to direct me to the top drawer of a bureau, where she told me I’d find the pick-up sticks.

I may be making that part up. More likely our mother, thinking ahead, had brought the pick-up sticks along and pulled them from her purse as we grew increasingly squirrely.

It doesn’t really matter. Either way, we were given the permission—the expectation, really—to get on the floor and play. The rest of the visit zipped along.

When the time came, I taught my nephew to play pick-up sticks, and about a year ago I introduced them to Clare. She and I played at the table, the same table where she found the pick-up sticks yesterday and promptly asked if she and John could play on the floor.

Of course, I said, and thought no more about it. But as I watched her grab the sticks in her fist, twist the bundle, then let it go, scattering the sticks like a dandelion head onto the floor, it all came back. And later, after their mom picked up Kate and John, and Clare and I made dinner and cleaned up, we played for best of three. On the floor. She creamed me.