I’m not Catholic but on occasion I do enjoy attending fish fries and other festivals they put on down there at the Catholic Church. It’s nice to do a little sinning with folks I don’t normally sin with – with all of their religious-sanctioned drinking and the gambling.

I went to a fish fry tonight. Man, was that some good fish! After eating enough fish that we started to worry about mercury poisoning, we put down the forks and walked over to check out the bingo parlor, thinking it might be fun to play a few rounds of bingo on a belly full of fish.

We walked up to the table where they were selling bingo cards. It was staffed by four or five church people sitting behind stacks and stacks of different colored bingo cards for sale. This was obviously an operation that was way more sophisticated than your garden-variety bingo. In an effort to better understand our options, we tried to declare ourselves as novice bingo players to the staff selling the cards. I mentioned a few times that we were unfamiliar with their terminology and could use some suggestions and maybe some explanations of the available options. Either the lady that was talking with us didn’t hear me or she had a hard time believing that somebody at a Catholic fish fry in the basement of the Catholic Church wouldn’t be familiar with bingo terminology.

All we knew is that we wanted to play now instead of waiting an hour and a half for the bigger games later. She kept repeating that there were early games available and, of course, “the jitney.”

She spoke of the jitney as if we knew full well what it was. I think I made myself pretty clear that we weren’t familiar with recreational bingo halls or a jitney. She ignored my direct and indirect inquiries about the jitney, but kept mentioning that we should get in on the jitney.

After about five minutes of this, we politely walked away from the bingo table. I am one who likes to know what they’re betting on so, in the absence of clear definition, I neglected to join in on the whole jitney thing.

We left the church still puzzled about the jitney. When we got home, we did an exhaustive Internet search: “jitney”, “bingo jitney”, “bingo words that sound like chutney”, etc. to see if we could increase our bingo knowledge. No luck. I couldn’t find anywhere that talked about or defined the word jitney.

I guess at this point, I would almost rather not know what jitney is and just enjoy this uncertainty with the whole thing. I suppose if any of you are familiar with what a jitney is as it applies to bingo, maybe you can clue me in through the comments on this post?

Now that I know bingo is so complicated, I have a better appreciation for why the elderly have so much difficulty with programming their DVR‘s – because their head is full of complicated bingo definitions and rules, there’s no room for anything else.