Playing Games

Note to self: Never play Scrabble with an ex-con. My brother was in prison for a little while, and one of the things he was allowed to do in the clinker was play Scrabble. So of course he decided that if he was going to play, he was going to win, and he memorized all the two-letter and a lot of the three-letter words in the official Scrabble dictionary. If you challenge his words, he proves you wrong and you lose all your turns, until he plays nonsense words and you're too scared to challenge them. Sigh. I guess I'm not the Scrabble champion in my family any longer. But that's okay. I'm really happy that he has gained his Scrab-fabulous skills, and I think he ought to go compete at the Scrabble Championship games, which I'm sure exist somewhere.

"So why won't you play with him anymore then?" my husband asked me. "Just because you aren't going to win, you aren't going to play Scrabble?" Sigh... What fun is a game that you know you can't win? I'll stick to Scrabble Beta games on facebook with E and Peter (not that you can't beat me, E! You have many times), and long Sunday afternoon Scrabble games with my husband where we go to look up a word in his gigantic unabridged dictionary and end up poring over diagrams of battleships or beetles.

And maybe I'm a word snob, but I just think that if you play a word in Scrabble, you should know what it means. Half the fun of playing an obscure word is the look on faces of people who go, "What does tripe mean?" The rest of the fun comes when you reply with, "Oh, you know, a cow's stomach." It's funny 'cause it's true.

Anyway, maybe I'll play Scrabble with my brother again sometime. I'm really happy for him because he and his wife are expecting their first baby and they just found out it's going to be a girl! I'm happy because it's so much more fun to sew things for girls than boys. Dresses are a hundred times easier to make than collar-shirts, I discovered recently. In fact, I think I will have a hundred dresses made before I figure out how to fit the collar to the yoke on the shirt I'm trying to make for my nephew. What's a yoke, you ask? Well, you'll have to play Scrabble with me to find out.