TheBanyanTree: Scrabbled

[Julie Anna Teague]

Quoting Rob McMonigal <trebro at gmail.com>:

> After many long months of struggle, I have, at last, topped Erica at Super
> Scrabble.

Super Scrabble?  There is something called Super Scrabble?  Be still my 
heart.  I love word games, but Scrabble, of course, reigns supreme.  My 
father's cousins (the rich cousins, we always called them, because it 
was a key thing and the cousins let no one forget it) always had a big 
Christmas party every year.  Several things about this big night are 
burned into my memory banks. One, the red and green dyed bread.  Two, 
the basement full of wild boy cousins with whom I never fit in.  And 
three, the scrabble game.

The adults were always encouraging me go to the basement and play with 
the other kids, but this was torture to me, and so I would go down and 
mope in a corner while all these destructive boys screamed around me 
for as long as I could stand it, and then I would slink back upstairs 
to the formal sitting room which, as far as I can tell, was soley 
reserved for the Christmas scrabble game. Fortunately I was a 
precocious kid who read a lot and knew a lot of words for an eight year 
old, so they let me watch for awhile, and sometimes they would let me 
actually play a round.  I was in heaven, even though I know I lost 
every time.  Pretty much everyone lost to Clark.  Clark was the 
engineer-genious of the family, married to my grandpa's sister, and he 
was the Scrabble champion every year.  Everyone knew he would win every 
time.  It was a family given.  It gave me something to aspire to.

I haven't gone to the family party for about a hundred years, but I 
still play Scrabble when I can talk anyone in my family into it.  I 
kill at Scrabble.  I clean up and take no prisoners.  My son will only 
tolerate a major defeat only once every few months, and my partner 
won't play at all anymore.

Postscript: We've discovered a new word game that is pretty darned 
good.  It's called Keesdrow (or Wordseek backwards).  It's sort of the 
bastard child of Scrabble and Boggle.  You might want to check it out.  
It evens the playing field a bit when you are playing word games with 
lesser humans.  Har har.

Julie