Scrabbling
My maternal grandmother loved to play Scrabble. When I was a little girl and she would stay with us, she and my mother would stay up late playing Scrabble and smoking, peering intently at their little trays around the kitchen table, occasionally adding new melty burn-marks to the vinyl tablecloth. How I wanted to join them! They always seemed to have such fun! They would laugh and talk throughout the game! Surely something was going on that was very exciting!
As a girl I longed to be older than I was, always. I wanted to talk with the adults at the dinner table. I wanted my nine-years-older-than-me brother’s friends to talk to me, to like me, even though I was a little kid. The thing I most wanted was not to be a little kid any more, but try as I might I couldn’t really do anything about that. I just wanted to be in on more of the jokes, to understand more! I read books and listened to music that I saw my parents or brother enjoying. And of course I got in on Scrabble as soon as I could.
I was terrible at it. My mother and grandmother were kind and supportive and encouraging, and I figured it was just something that would get easier for me as I got older, like reaching things on higher shelves or understanding “Doonesbury.” I got older. I got smarter. My vocabulary became, frankly, intimidating.
I could not beat my grandmother at Scrabble. Ever. I am not sure I ever did, at least not before she started sliding into senile dementia in her 90s.
As a surly young adult I turned against the game I’d so wanted to enjoy as a girl. Clearly Scrabble was a stupid game and not worth my time. When my grandmother would visit and we’d get out the board, I would heave a meaning-laden sigh and make it very clear to all that I was resigning myself to my imminent defeat out of a sense of familial obligation only. I was a good daughter, so I did my mother and grandmother the wonderful favor of “playing” Scrabble with them, for some definition of “playing” that really meant “whining and complaining.” I’m sure they were thrilled to have me “playing” with them by emitting a constant low-volume stream of mild obscenities occasionally punctuated with an outburst of “ALL I HAVE IS VOWELS!” and some scowling. Surely the light of shared experience shone in their eyes as I practically tripped over my own feet getting away from the table at the end of the game.
When I grew up still a little more I learned something. My mother was never all that fond of Scrabble either. “Your grandmother just loves it,” she said, shrugging, when I asked why she kept playing. That certainly put a different spin on things. I started getting into the games a little more. Instead of focusing the whole time on the fact that I have the pattern recognition skills of a three-toed sloth with a migraine, and that the biggest vocabulary in the world can’t help you when you have six “E” tiles and an “X” sitting on that damned little tray, I started to focus on the shared time we had at the table. Mom and Grandma weren’t smoking inside anymore, and maybe the games took a little longer now that Grandma was moving a little slower. But there was talking and laughter for hours. The smiles around the table got more genuine, mine because I was finally starting to get it, theirs because I was not such an insufferable git about the game anymore.
I almost got it. Sometimes we do things that we don’t love with, or for, the people we do love. At first I thought that was all – suck it up and do the thing you hate because it will make someone else happy. What it seems to have taken me forever to learn is that it’s about more than sucking it up. It’s about letting the love you have for the other person transform you. About feeling the joy that they experience, nearly as your own. True empathy is hard to come by, but maybe if we sit at enough Scrabble tables we can start to figure it out.
January 18, 2010
· 
Jen · 
9 Comments
Tags: figuring it out, love · Posted in: Uncategorized
9 Responses
I so needed to read this today.
Thank you thank you! now get some sleep!
You’re welcome Michele! I got some sleep, maybe just not quite enough. Well, there’s always tonight for more!
I HATE Scrabble. I’ve played it a couple of times…never again. I already play Rummikub to satisfy my grandmother, which is like Scrabble with numbers. Oy.
Boggle, however, is the bomb. It’s much less puzzle-dependant and more vocabulary oriented.
Woo, commenting on your actual blog rather than You Know Where!
Ah, many are my “insufferable git” moments with family; if I could go back, I would certainly reorder my priorities. I’m glad you came around to enjoying the game with your mother and grandma — what a great story.
I’ve loved Scrabble forever; Dad broke out the set every weekend while we were growing up. I still play it with my father and siblings at every family get-together, even if it means trying to cudgel one’s brain into good working order after a gut-busting Thanksgiving meal. Dad usually wins out of sheer grit, even though he probably has the least English vocab of all of us; I tend to give up easily and throw down a low-point word just to get my turn over with. Scrabble is more about persistence than brilliance.
Alex – I’ve got timed-game anxiety, though. Isn’t Boggle timed? I’m so fussy with games.
I’ll also note that I have only tried to play Scrabble once since my grandmother’s passing in 2003 – and I still hated it. Take out the family camaraderie and it leaves me cold! =)
Amber – Woo! And the LJ isn’t a big secret or nuthin’. I just want consolidated conversations!
Sadly this seems to mean that all the comments left on my LJ on previously cross-posted blog posts are now gone. =/
Katherine, good point. I don’t have much persistence either.
*love*
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