Day #22 Writing Through COVID-19: Scrabbled

My mother and I carry within us countless lines of poetry. Last night when she mentioned pretty dandelions on the lawn, I began reciting "Oh, burdock, and you other dock--" and she chimed in: "That have ground coffee for your seeds--" In unison, we finished Edna St. Vincent Millay's sweet tribute to weeds. This launched us into recitation of Millay's figs. But when we tried to recall "The Ballad of the Harp Weaver," we had only bits and pieces between us.

So this morning I printed the poem and brought it to my mother with her morning meds. It's kind of a creepy poem, actually, but my mom has always loved Edna, so it was a good start to our day.

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At lunchtime, I invited my parents to play Scrabble with me at 2 p.m. when my ZOOM teaching was over. They accepted the date happily.

Thus began one of the biggest failures of our time together so far.

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It's not easy to judge what my parents can and cannot do with confidence and pleasure. Two days ago I played chess with my dad and he whipped me soundly. I call that success! But today Scrabble spiraled us into despair. 

Within the first minutes of the game, my mom was confused about how many letters she should have. 

My dad struggled to understand that "double word score" only applies the first time a tile is placed.

When my mom proudly placed "crutch" on the board, my dad and I both tried to explain that if a word butts up against others, they must all still make words.

I felt my mom bristle at our correction. "Well then I can't play anything," she snapped. 

I asked to see her tiles and began offering various plays she could make, but she said, "It feels like cheating if you have to help me." She sounded both angry and sad.

Later, telling my sister about it, I said it felt like trying to calm a skitterish horse. I wanted to soothe my mom away from her frustration, but I had to do so without talking down to her or adding to her befuddlement. 

We didn't dare make eye contact. 

Then my mom reached out and put R-A-G on the board. Success! Unfortunately, she had not connected her letters to any others on the board--which is the central tenet of the game. I glanced at my dad to see if he was going to point out her mistake, but he was already planning his next play, so I assumed we had silently agreed to show my mother grace.

I deliberately placed my tiles in ways that offered my competition the most options for building off my words. I took my turns as quickly as possible, while my addled parents took F-O-R-E-V-E-R.

On my dad's next turn, he gleefully played Z-O-O. Like my mother, his tiles were not connected to any others on the board. Evidently, we had now rewritten the rules of Scrabble. But unlike my mother, who had placed R-A-G on low-value squares, my competitive father placed his strategically in the far corner to garner a triple word score of 33.

We were not having fun. But we also don't know how to quit.

Each time it was my mother's turn, I felt myself holding my breath. I knew I could ignore her mistakes, but I wasn't sure my dad would. Time and again she placed tiles up against others and my dad called her out. She huffed, and I then pointed out the wide-open spaces on the board, encouraging her to put together whatever word she wanted in no-man's-land. 

At this point, I was the only person remotely adhering to any rules. My dad was openly browsing through the Scrabble dictionary to find words. My mom had a C and a K and seemed unable to understand that she did not have to use them together. 

The game took us two and a half hours.  As I subtracted the points of our unplayed tiles (I was left holding two Qs), I felt exultant. We had survived.

My dad, of course, won. 

My mother came in second.

I am third.