Mom has this aggravating habit of being better than I am at, well, everything. Except, maybe, blogging, but only because she doesn’t have a blog. Now that I’ve written that, she’ll probably go get a blog, come into my bedroom, and force me to add her to my blogroll at fingernail point. (Seriously – she has these wickedly-sharp fingernails. Just waving them within five inches of my face is enough to make me do pretty much anything she wants.)
Scrabble
I was eleven or twelve when Mom brought home a brand-new Scrabble board and asked if I wanted to learn how to play. She explained the basic concept of the game, then slapped a fake-wood rack down in front of me and told me to draw seven tiles. While she chain smoked – and, by the way, got cigarette ashes all over the board, which is totally like just about every other activity we did together when I was growing up – I tried to figure out what I was going to do with a rack full of vowels. Seriously: How do you make a word with E-I-E-I-O-U-U? (Keep in mind that I wasn’t even a teenager at the time and, therefore, did not see diddly squat in that rack. Actually? I still don’t. Because, despite lots of Scrabble playing over the years, I still kind of suck at this game.)
I tried “Oui.”
“That’s, uh, French or something," I said when Mom raised her eyebrows into her hairline.
“We’re Americans. Use a real word.”
“But it IS a real word.”
“Not in this country it isn’t.”
Oh, and she didn’t tell me that I could exchange tiles. Oh, no. She sprang that on me a few plays later, when she said, “Exchange four,” and neglected to put down a word.
“Hey! You can do that?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said, in her, “If I were being any more sarcastic, the awesomeness of my sheer talent would melt your preadolescent face,” tone.
“You never said anything about trading tiles.”
“Well, now you know.”
Soon, it became very obvious that Mom had no intention of going easy on me. She had never, in my life, soft pedaled where games were concerned. You either beat her fair and square or lost. Why? Because she didn’t want to insult you, that’s why. The one time I kicked her butt at chess, I knew that I had earned the victory. And believe me, legitimately beating up your Mom’s chess pieces is way cooler than winning because she threw the match.
While I stuck to the few words that I actually knew back then, Mom let loose all of the words that she’d picked up over the decades. I was playing crap like “kick” and “forge,” while she was laying down epics like “ballooning” and “xylophone.” The final score was…well…lopsided at best, considering that she had three digits to my two.
This butt stomping continued throughout my teen years. Even though my vocabulary kept growing, and even though I eventually found enough brains to read the “Q without U words” suggestions printed on the inside of the Scrabble box’s lid, Mom kept improving her game at the same time. She laid down things that couldn’t possibly be real words. “Ti”? What was that? (A tree, or something, apparently. And really a word, at least according to the folks who produce the Scrabble dictionary.)
Even now, I can whip up on her only when she has a migraine. And that’s because I challenge the gibberish that she lays down. Sorry, but “aaoiuer” isn’t a word, at least not in English.
The nice thing about Mom, though, is that she’s a gracious winner. The phrase, “In your FACE, weenie child o’ mine!” has escaped her mouth only once, and that was only because we were wagering on the game's outcome. (I had to do dishes because she whipped up on me. Had I won, she would have given me...fifty cents.)
