Cribbage: Why?

Sir John Suckling aka Boring

Lizzie has decided she's going to not only save our marriage but add zest to it. I can be very, very boring; TV and the computer, baby. It's my life. When The Queen came back from the lake she bought me a couple of gifts. A book detailing instructions on how to play thirty different card games and a cribbage board shaped in the State of Iowa. It's snazzy looking; 14" in length and proportionately sized in width. It has a brown shellac and could easily find a place on my man-cave wall.
I gotta tell ya', though, I'm not much of a card player. In college I was more than proficient at pinochle. I also snuck in a game of hearts and euchre once in awhile but over the years I've forgotten the rules and that, for me, is a huge problem. I cannot read and retain. If someone tells or shows me I'm okay but reading and understanding---ain't gonna happen. So, here we were, out on our deck learning the rules of cribbage. I'd read the rules and Lizzie would translate; fifteen two or something like that. I'd deal six cards and turn one over on the deck(never could figure out what to do with that one so if you know chime in). We had 'dummy' rounds for a half hour, Lizzie thanked me for my patience, and I returned to my TV knowing full well I'd faked the entire card learning process.
As I resumed my prone position on the couch I started thinking: who would invent a game like cribbage? What would even give them the idea? Long story short it comes from England in the late 1500's. It was a game called Noddy, but refined in the early 1600's by a fella named Sir John Suckling. How apropos. To me that's like Thomas Crapper inventing the toilet. Didn't people have better things to do in those days? I do understand Suckling was royalty of sorts and depended on the peasants for his food and wine but inventing a card game? C'mon! There had to be more important things on people's minds. Did Suckling wake up in one morning and say, "Today, I'm going to refine a card game"?. I'd think soap and toothpaste would have been high on his list in those days. My next item of business is to get Lizzie off the cribbage game. I'm going to try Euchre and if that's too difficult I'll shoot for "Go Fish". I play that with my grand kids and I can kick their collective butts without reading a bunch of silly rules.