Games

“Let’s play a game!” usually meant it was time to pull out the old burgundy box with the gold script spelling out “Scrabble” and one corner held together with yellowed and peeling tape. Our game only had one blank wooden tile, the other had the capital letter “A”, followed by a tiny “1” etched into it’s surface with ball point pen. My brothers and sister and I spanned fourteen years, so there was much cheating — mostly in favor of the youngest. “Let me see your letters” was a common request, and then we’d all brainstorm on the best way to get the most points.

We kept our two-letter word list handy and many of our “x,y,z” words came from that list — “X” was easy, with “ex”, “ax”, “ox” and “xi” allowed, but “z”! If we didn’t get two “o”’s, we were stuck with trying to find a loose “a” on the board to spell “za”.

Our Scrabble board was standard — there were only four letter racks — so someone had to lay their tiles out on the table, shielding them best they could with a sheet of paper. We all agreed, the best time to play was late at night when we were exhausted and super silly. Nonsense words and challenges flew around the table on those nights. One night my middle brother coined the word, “Murrient”.

“That’s not a word!”

“Is too.”

“Well, it’s not English!”

“Is too.”

“Use it in a sentence!”

“That’s not murrient.” It was hard to argue in the face of his determination, so we let it stand, grumbling our disatisfaction. “Murrient” became a byword for many years, used in a variety of ways, and always met with laughter. Looking it up on the internet, I see it is Latin, obviously not acceptable in an English Scrabble game! At some point we began to keep the Scrabble dictionary handy when we played.

One cold winter night a game was played that went down in (family) history. My cousin and her family were visiting, and Suzy got pulled into a game with other players, including my father. Halfway through the game, he wasn’t winning, and he was tired of playing, so the board “accidently” flew up from the table and landed on the floor. Decades later, even years after his death, we bring up that game and watch Suzy laugh incredulously.

Now the old board is gone, the new one is huge and spins on a turntable and gathers dust, as we play endless games of Words with Friends on our smartphones and computers.