I have just returned from a weekend of high-stakes card games in Atlantic City. No, not in any casino; I was visiting a beach house full of friends and family, playing games with their little kids.

Thank goodness their parents didn’t let us play for money.

The first game was something called “Flutter.” It used a regular deck of cards. “You take half the cards and I take the rest,” explained my 4-year-old teacher. “Then we each put out a card, and somebody wins both cards.”

I knew this game — it was just “War” by another name. I could do this.

But as the game wore on, it resembled “War” less and less.

“Oh, look at that,” I said. “You have a seven, but I have a ten. Looks like I win this round.” I put out my hand to take in both cards.

“But the seven is black and ten is red and black beats red, so I win,” he said, scooping up the cards.

I tried again. “Hey, I’ve got a King! There’s only one card that can beat a king,” I start to explain.

“A three!” he crowed, taking my King with his three.

“But…but….but it was a black King,” I stammer. Uselessly. He is already finished with this game, and so to be honest am I.

The next game was “Sleeping Queens.” It sounded completely made up to me, but cards of some kind were passed around, and then I proceeded to lose.

“You just have to wake up the Queens,” one little girl told me.

“How do I do that?”

“The King wakes them up, silly. Like this.” And she proceeded to take the Pancake Queen off the board. “Now it’s your turn,” she told me.

I thought about giving a speech on female empowerment and how nobody needs to wait for a King to wake her up; then I looked at my audience, waiting impatiently for me to finish my turn. I decided to just look at my cards instead. “So…I guess my Turtle King can wake up the Moon Queen and take her away.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not? Isn’t that what you just did?”

“You can’t because I have a sleeping potion and I put her back to sleep.”

“Oh. Ok.” As long as there’s a good reason.

When my turn came again, I knew what to do. “I am putting your Queen of Pancakes back to sleep with my sleeping potion,” I announced.

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have a magic wand that erases the sleeping potion.”

The game went on like that until nap time. I needed the break.

As soon as I got home, I looked up “Sleeping Queens” and found it for sale on Amazon, so maybe it is a real game, and maybe it really does have the rules I ran afoul of that day. But it still feels completely arbitrary to me.

But that experience awakened something in me — a memory of when my brother and his family visited me years ago. That was the spring when I decided to start my herb garden in flower pots on my screened-in porch. Apparently my nephew, about 7 years old, had never seen this before.

“What are these?” he asked, puzzled.

“These are my herbs,” I answered him. “This one is Basil.”

“Ok … What’s this one?”

“That’s Sage.”

He looked up at me, square in the eyes, and asked, “You make up names for your plants? Like for pets?”

“Oh, no, no,” I hastened to explain. “These names aren’t made up; that’s just what they are.”

“Uh huh,” he said, clearly unconvinced. “So what’s this one?”

“Um….” I didn’t want to answer, but couldn’t see any way around it. “That’s Rosemary.”

I don’t think he ever really believed me. But now I know how he felt. It’s exactly the same way I feel about those Sleeping Queens.