Scrabbled Memories

 

Warning: the following account of past events is based on faction and the ratio of fact to fiction is yet to be determined.

With regards to any ability I may have for creative writing I must thank my mother as she quickly assumed the position of grammar police once I began to talk and then at least doubled her time on the beat when writing came into the picture. I suppose all mothers do this to a certain degree but not the nth degree. I love my mother.

Mom loved to play Scrabble and to this day I cannot understand why she picked on me when she had four corrigible daughters at her disposal. When we first played I would be squirming in my seat waiting for mom to play which she did and then said to me it’s your turn and I froze and drew a big blank… What’s wrong she said? Here let me see if I can help you on your first word. Turn your tile tray towards me. I did so and she strained to hold back the laughter- your tiles are all backwards! Here let’s turn them around! I was a fairly quick study and in due course I improved enough to find myself nipping at her heals at the finish line. At first we didn’t use a dictionary because it was in mom’s head but I kept trying to make words out of nothing so she finally had enough, got up and came back with a dictionary and said there you go, have fun with it! I didn’t ask how to spell words any more but I learned how to quickly look up words.

There were two main things that I learned playing Scrabble with my mom. Firstly I greatly improved my spelling and expanded my vocabulary. Secondly I learned to gain an advantage (perhaps cheat) at the game so that I could do what mattered to me the most – win! I discovered that the wood grain on the back of the tiles were all slightly different so to begin I keyed in on the most important ones first – blank, S, Z, Q, J, and K were soon committed to memory and eventually most of the others were also memorized. I so proficient that I could go back to the beginning and look at the box of face down tiles and make up words without turning them around. I was now winning most of the time and I’m sure that mom was rather perplexed at least until a few years later the when the tiles were thrown in a bag so I was now picking blind like everyone else.  Subsequently I didn’t seem to get as many good letters which was reflected in fewer points attained and more losses.

One time I tried to use the word ain’t and mom said “If I told you once I’ve told you a thousand times ain’t isn’t a word and words with apostrophes aren’t allowed. If ain’t ain’t a word how do you know it has an apostrophe in it - she frowned.

So I thought about it and said “If ain’t isn’t right it’s wrong, If isn’t ain’t right it’s wrong but if isn’t ain’t wrong it’s right so aren’t, ain’t and isn’t ain’t right. Right?”

She said, “As I’ve told you before David, you should become a lawyer because you can always argue your case!” Perhaps I should have heeded that advice.

© David Girard 27/04/20