Scrabble Session Report: The Co-op Aspect of Matches with The Moms
I ate some fine food with the ‘rents in Taos last September. Tagged along with them for a day trip to Ojo Caliente, their favorite self-care amusement park.
When you’re a nice person such as The Moms is, you generate all kinds of cool opportunities in the Denver Nice Old Person Barter Economy. She spent a whole day teaching somebody how to can food at home. They kicked her back a free stay in a beautiful house in Taos.
The house had a name, like estates do. It was so pretty it hurt, and so was the street where it sat, dozing in inauspicious good taste under its dome of sweet air and decades of fastidious zoning. There was a block’s worth of desert meadow across the lane. Cars passed rarely and at reverent speeds when they did.
Inside, we stole away to sleep when we liked, sometimes gathering to read or scroll at the central table. No bigger decisions here than the timing of coffee, the composition of snack plates — the unforced overlap of the domestic rhythms of two octogenarians and their middle-aged son.
The last evening included a game of Scrabble, which The Moms always asks for when I see her and which I usually manage to dodge because I’m a finicky twat. But by then the neighborhood and the company had loosened me up. I’d have eaten kibble out of a stranger’s unwashed hand.
She cleared the table while my stepdad scrolled on his iPad and listened to 20th Century composers. It was a magnetic travel set, its longest journey taken through two generations of her family. I will likely end up with it some day. Every tile was still there.
The action and the company were good. I recognized in her my approach to the game: Competitive, but leavened with the pure delight of words. Both of us were prone to unwise plays that open up parts of the board to the opponent because the word we found was too pretty not to line up.
That kind of thing would never fly with her brother, who has one of those Scrabble dictionaries that lets you smash your opponent to their knees with two- and three-letter words that all sound like rocks.
He always played this way. During my visits to Chicago as a boy, he’d play his 3M Bookshelf Games with me when he was in med school, no quarter given. “The object of the game,” he would always say with the purr of a deadpan emcee, “is to win. The winner — that’s me —…” Then he’d describe the game and beat me soundly.
Those 3M games — as well as my grandmother’s 1980s Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit — are in my care now. It’s not written down in any of the succession docs that sit in a plastic binder back in Starkville, but I assume I’ll be the keeper of Mom’s travel Scrabble set, providing I do her the courtesy of staying on the right side of the dirt longer than she does.
Neither of us played to lose, but there was a broader concord informing the match: To prod sparks from the hidden vaults of language and admire them together. The beauty of Scrabble — or any good trivia or word game — reminded me that we’re all water bugs skating on the black pools of the self. What’s down there?
Looking for a midgame play, I found the word “griot” was down there. I couldn’t remember the definition or how I came by it, this emissary from the sleeping water of the mind.
I mostly managed to keep pace with her, but I got the bad end of two of the game’s three challenges. The lost turns were the game’s winning margin.
***
A few summers ago I woke up with a sore back and hamstrings and a plangent, tentacled hangover because I’d spent the late evening and early morning, drunk as a lord, standing bent over my kitchen counter yelling into my laptop and trading vintage Trivial Pursuit questions with an equally drunken high school friend.
I got a question about which two actors refused their Oscars in the ‘70s. He gave me an astonishingly long time to get it. He gloats when we wins — once he did it so bad I hung up on him — but he was rooting for me on this one.
I somehow knew that one had to be Marlon Brando because he was cagey and artistic. I strained until the other one arrived: “It was George C. Scott,” I said after several minutes of plumbing…I don’t know. It seemed beyond reasoning, beyond memory. Magical alcoholic treasure hunt. The brain is a protean dungeon map with endless replayability. He huzzahed as if the answer were his own.
***
After The Moms packed the set back into the drawstring bag, her imploring post-game question IDed the real opponent at the table: the doldrums of forgetting.
“I need to ask you a question,” she said. I braced for unwanted family revelation. “Did you let me win? Did I do that on my own?”
She’s sensitive to her growing memory gaps, vigilant to slippage. I was happy to tell her I’d played at my peak and lost straight up.
Back to a theme I touched on while learning Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: I’m a neurotic dude, and five years in the country living solo has brought me all the best and worst of my lifelong drive for emotional autonomy and time un-crimped by the desires or impressions other people have of the world, which are torture when not taken in careful bites.
At the best: This buys me the time I need to be possessed totally by what is worthy, thereby erasing time. At the worst: I fail to recognize the midpoint where a version of this joy can be found with others, and judge others ungenerously for their clumsiness in recognizing the melodies of my private hymnal.
I wanted to report the final score in this segment, so I asked her to text me the outcome, which I know she wrote down.
That she keeps forgetting.