Word Play

“Kate, do you know where Scrabble is?”

Not exactly what I was expecting when I flipped open my phone.

“Uh, no Ma. Is it in the closet under the stairs?”

“No! I looked there.”

“Under your bed?”

“No.”

This whole frantic interrogation was brought on by a similarly frantic phone call from my grandmother to my mother when she discovered that her Scrabble game was missing.

This is possibly the worst crisis that has ever occurred in either of our households.

My grandmother, my mother, and I are the most cut-throat, competitive, rabid Scrabble players in the history of Parker Brothers gamedom.

Every year, when my family visits my grandparents in Wisconsin, there is a violent, cross-generational clash of vocabularies and triple word scores around the worn kitchen table. Just the clicking of the little wooden tiles being jostled in their cloth bag is enough to send my brothers, father and grandfather into basement hibernation. They know what comes next: at least three hours worth of squabbling over points and spelling, disjointed bits of small talk, and the occasional stream of profanity.

Sometimes I win. Sometimes not. It really doesn’t matter though. It’s all in the struggle.

I’ve been beefing up my Scrabble word arsenal for the last couple of months (minding my ‘Q’s especially) in order to prepare myself for zero hour: spring break 2008, when my mother and I sojourn to the frozen wastes of Wisconsin to do battle again.

Which brings us back to our initial problem. Grandma’s ancient, stained-tile Scrabble is missing.

And apparently so is mine.

Now before you start hypothesizing about word-junkie aliens who’ve been quietly stealing Scrabble games across the country, remember the male contingent of my family and their utter loathing of the word game. Which leads me to believe that either one or both of the games is stuffed within the frightening clutter of the garage work bench, or in a duct in the attic, far from any place we would normally look.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

If they don’t turn up, it’s nothing that a short trip down to the Wal-Mart game-aisle won’t fix, and we’ll be back at it again: making words out of all vowels, siccing vocabularies on each other, and spelling out much, much more than high-scoring words.

We write memories all over that board.