I cannot for the life of me remember my first Scrabble game.  In my fuzzy hazy picture of my childhood, the Scrabble board was always there.  Although a precocious child, I could not have been close to match for my mother until I was in university, and it is perhaps then that the games started.   Or even later.  But they are a fixture of my relationship with my mother, and with a few other people in my life.

For a short time before I left home, I played Scrabble with a man who was a little older than me, who worked at the same newspaper I worked at: he was my boss. And he loved Scrabble.  He played defensively and aggressively at the same time.  The result was that his score consistently topped 400, and the finished board looked more like a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle than a Scrabble board. But he taught me one way to play the game, different from what I'd grown up with.  And above all else, he taught me that one never exchanged a letter for the blank when one had the letter the blank was representing.  Darn!

Particularly once I left home, my parents liked to visit.   Often, in many cases, depending on whether  I was two hours away or ten hours away by car.  But visit they did, and usually just for a weekend.  Much as I had my years of being sure my family life had been and continued to be perfect, followed by eyars of being sure everything about my childhood had been dangerously dysfunctional, it was never easy to spend time with my mother. One of the best defences was a  Scrabble board.

On some weekends, my mother and I would play ten games over three days.  I distinctly recall being about as a good a player as my mother for most of our time playing together, and for a brief time being considerably better, followed by one in which she excelled consistently.  To her memory, of course, I always humuliated her at the game, but she was a glutton for that kind of punishment at least.  Not to mention her frequent victories, which she could always herald as being entirely too rare!

After my father died, my mother had long, lonely periods.   And, although we didn't know it at the time, she was becoming ill.  So she was soon sleepless from cancer as well as grief.  Since we could not always be with her, I finally convinced her to get a computer, if only so that she could play Scrabble against the computer on those sleepless nights.  And play she did -- for hours on end, night after night.  Although her final 18 months were not pleasant ones, she at least had the distraction of Scrabble for most of the period, either against the computer, or against me.  (The practice against the computer was showing: she beat me two times out of three in this period.)

Starting when my parents would visit me as an adult, I had another friend who shared my passion for Scrabble.  It rapidly became one of many ways we passed time together.  Now, almost twenty years later, it's still one of our favourite ways to spend time.  Although more than a year had passed since we'd spent an evening in conversation with each other, we were drawn together again this fall, and played a game about two weeks ago, and two more games this evening. 

In general, this friend -- who is also a playwright -- is considerably better than I am.  He's more creative with words, and more patient with figuring out those seven-letter wonders, and more strategic about passing and exchanging letters.  But, as we play more leisurely games, that both of us are engaged in to relax, I'm finding I'm sometimes playing better.  Tonight, for example, he beat me by 100 points in the first game, but I beat him by 80 points in the second game.  I feel vindicated on the evening.  Almost.

The pleasure, though,. is in the conversation.  In the love for words.  In the pace. In the exchange.  Friendly competition and building on each other's literacy and cunning.  There are fewer pleasures that offer so much in such a short time.  Peace.  Relaxation. Intellectual stimulation.  Fun. Good company.  And good times.  Let the Scrabble be with you, I say.

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