CONFESSIONS OF A SCRABBLE SLUT

by Roberta Jean Bryant


“You’re nothing but a Scrabble slut!” my friend Delilah remarked. “You’ll play Scrabble anywhere, anytime, with anybody.” Delilah likes stirring things up, using provocative language, always hoping for a good argument.

“Pretty much,” I cheerfully agreed, to her dismay.

Scrabble for me, I confess, is an addiction, an affliction, a passion, a joy. Although I’ve always been obsessed with words, Scrabble was just a fun game that I was pretty good at for a long time. And for years I was too busy earning a living to have time for much game playing.

After I stopped traveling and working fulltime I joined the National Scrabble Club on a whim. The weekly meeting of the local chapter was in the U district at night and I hated driving at night so I seldom attended. I read the monthly newsletter, found a Sunday afternoon meeting in Lake Forest Park and started playing three or four games a week there. I noticed that some of the Sunday afternoon players used what looked like a chess clock

I discovered that any relationship between Scrabble Club games and family Scrabble was in name only. This Scrabble had less to do with words than it did with
strategy and intimidation – like a combination of chess and poker – ultimately a numbers game. It was important to keep track of the power letters – the high-face-value J, K, Q, X, Z and the four versatile S tiles, to memorize the Q words such as qat -- which did not require a U, and to be bold about swapping puny letters in lieu of taking a turn. This new-to-me Scrabble was challenging and bloody serious. I loved it. And I didn’t always win. But with delight I always learned.

I found out about a tournament in Portland over the Labor Day weekend and decided, again on a whim, to sign up. At that time I was still living in a small motorhome so the travel and accommodations were no problem; I could sleep in the hotel parking lot. Playing Scrabble with a clock might be a problem. So, I managed to play a few games with the clock before Labor Day. To my dismay it added a level of distraction to my game because every time I completed a move I had to remember to hit the clock; this stopped dinging my quota of twenty-five minutes and started ticking away at my opponent’s minutes. Each game took fifty minutes total.

I’d always been a fast player, but this clock thing could bite me if I forgot to hit it and allowed my opponent to take his turn on my minutes which I did several times. I headed to Portland with both excitement and trepidation. I feared I’d be outclassed and outmaneuvered in every game of the twenty games scheduled. My goal was to play as many games as possible with people who were capable of beating me. I figured that covered everybody, so, how could I lose? At the very least I’d have the opportunity to learn a lot about this new Scrabble.

I was astonished to win over a third of the games I played, and I did learn a lot. I knew I was seriously hooked when I bought my own clock and began accumulating gear. I now own seven sets of letters known as “tiles,” four Scrabble boards, three tournament dictionaries or word lists, two travel Scrabble sets, one clock, and several instruction books for tournament players. Some of these things I actually won at tournaments.

These days I play as often as I can manage. I play games with Maven -- a computer Scrabble setup. I play several e-mail games daily with people I met at tournaments. I used to have a friend I played two games with nightly, and when I spend up to three months in Guatemala during the winter I have a group of friends I play with every day.

In addition, I keep attending nearby tournaments resolved to continue doing so as long as I am having fun. I never considered myself to be particularly competitive until I began playing tournament Scrabble. Now I know myself to be intensely competitive. And although winning is important, winning is still not as important as having fun and learning. I am perpetually in search of a worthy opponent -- someone who is as avid about playing as I am.

What I like best about my guilty pleasure is the fact that playing requires everything from me in every moment I spend at the board – all my problem solving ability, all my stamina, all my patience. What I get for this investment of time and energy is pure joy in being in the now. For years I failed to properly appreciate the value of a joyful pastime in my life, until I experienced a deep depression with no joy to be found anywhere.

Bottom line on this wordy subject? Have board; will travel. Scrabble, anyone?

KILLING POLLYANNA


Niceness is a plague upon women. Society places a premium on it -- deeming niceness as an unmitigated and necessary virtue. This has resulted in generations of women pretending to be nice at the expense of their own integrity; women violating their selves lest society do it for them.

Pollyanna, the heroine of a 1913 children’s lit classic, plays the glad game – always finding something in every situation to be glad about. The glad girl serves as the poster child for philosophical statements such as: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” “Silence is golden.” “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” That one works really well if the goal is the accumulation of the most flies! Pollyannaism has been defined as “excessive optimism to the point of naivety; a refusal to accept facts.”

Back when I was married I tried to keep myself in line using the comparison game. Telling myself, at least I’m not as bad off as Louise. Or, regarding my husband, at least he doesn’t drink, or smoke, or beat me. I should be glad for my many blessings. Ignoring the fact that I was miserable. Ignoring his verbal abuse of me, and our children. Ignoring the fact that he had no respect for women in general, and no respect for me in particular.

At that time I had no way of sticking up for myself; I had grown up in a religion of lonely women; my mother simply took to her bed if things didn’t go her way. Besides it was a different time in society as a whole. One result for me was that I squandered my lifetime quota of pity on myself. Wallowing for months at a time, drowning in inarticulate grievances. Struck mute by abysmal self-esteem, and a sense of deserving no better.

There is something to be said for the power of positive thinking and all that crap, but not here, not now. I find it interesting these days that people are often more interested in my rants (of which this is an example) than they are in my occasional lyrical or descriptive efforts.

Ironically, ranting aside, I know myself to be a genuinely kind person – fundamentally good. I abhor hurting people’s feelings. Despite the fact that I’m uncomfortable when I’m accused of niceness in general, I admit that, in particular, my kind behavior can seem to fall into that category.

However, being referred to as “nice” these days is a damning-with-faint-praise cliché. Call me boring, call me rude, call me tacky, just don’t call me nice. For a long time I’ve known that, for women writers, niceness needs to take a backseat to truth telling anyway. Therefore, I think killing Pollyanna – that false niceness inside me still – is a continuing worthwhile goal.