House Arrest

Scrabble is a math game January 3, 2011

One of the really nice things about Dawn (my wife) is that she can’t remember the punch line of a joke, no matter how many times she’s heard it.

Imagine a large, informal social gathering with more people than can comfortably fit in the kitchen alone. Somewhere near a heating source or close to the table laden with food, you’ll find Dawn and myself and eight or so people. Dawn and I are the ones with the root beer and cookies. Eventually, inevitably, as the sun must set each evening, someone will unwittingly make The Straight Line.  “Oh, yes,” I say, clearing my throat, “in fact …”

At this point half of those eight people will recognize that Harry is about to tell The Joke. Again. These astute listeners will suddenly see a person across the room they must speak with immediately. Or they find their glass needs refilling, having just spilled it down their own shirt. But the remaining hapless souls, genteel and polite deer in the headlights, are frozen in place. Dawn is one of them. As the joke uncoils and understanding of the dangers dawns, every facial expression slowly rearranges and locks into a defensive, smiling grimace, braced for the full-frontal punch line. Except for Dawn.  Her eyebrows furrow. Her tongue sticks slightly out one side of her mouth firmly wedged between her teeth. When the hateful punch line is delivered of my mouth, they all flinch, and then nod and smile knowingly with the best manners of the well bred. Except Dawn. She laughs. A real laugh. She’s heard the joke a hundred times, and she still finds it funny.

I married the right woman.

This miraculous trait of hers extends to other realms. Lately I discovered it includes the game Scrabble. When the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins converge from the four compass points to meet at a cabin or beach rental for some holiday, after we have processed more carbohydrates than an ethanol Hummer, dutifully followed with the latest seasonal sweetmeats from the Disney mill, we stay up until the wee hours playing Scrabble. People rotate in and out of The Game, taking turns putting children to bed, washing dishes, or  finishing up the birthday cake; it is always near enough someone’s birthday at these gatherings.

Dawn loves Scrabble, but she can’t seem to win. I can beat her easily, though her vocabulary, counting medical and biological terms, is at least three times as large as mine. Because she can’t seem to understand that it is not really a word game. It is a math game. You can beat anyone if you know a sufficient number of short words (including all the two-letter words published in the Scrabble instructions) AND if you pay attention to those little colored squares on the board. Dawn thinks they are decoration.

She has managed to start our last three games with six letter words and can come up with tricks like adding “ous” to my “hide” but she doesn’t get many points for it. Whereas I will put down an S and an X, forming two words across and one down with the X on a triple letter score, thus getting 55 points. Count ‘em – fifty-five! That’s an average of 27.5 points per letter! You see, it’s a math game.

By the way, the word was “SIX,” ok? Honestly, you people.

I think she’s finally catching on though, so I need to distract her. I suggested we start a new version of Scrabble called SciFi/Fantasy scrabble. You can form any word as long as it appears in some science fiction or fantasy novel or story. Words such as “orc,” “muggle,” or even “tardis” count, if the purists will allow that Tardis has graduated in the lexicon from acronym to full-fledged word, much like the English word “tip” supposedly coming from “to insure promptness”. However, I would still insist that proper nouns are illegal. So even though one could truly rack up points with it, however tempting it might be, one could not use “Eryx” from Lovecraft’s “In the Walls of Eryx.” Nor could one empty the tray with “Ni” (as in, “The knights who say…”). I think that will keep her mind off those little, decorative, colored squares for several months.