Good Morning.
Last week my daughter and I cleaned out the guest room closet of at least twenty board games. Some had missing parts and got pitched. Others were taken to Good Will, and a few I kept in case we ever get enough people together to have Game Night again. I have reserved two editions of Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories, and Balderdash. The possibilities for playing Scrabble, Cribbage, and Mah Jongg are less promising, but I am keeping those boards in honor of previous, memorable matches.
I fondly recall occasions with other games, but perhaps the most interesting involved a game of Boggle at the home of my parents in 1980 or thereabouts. You need to picture the participants here: two proper, older New Englanders, a less well-behaved daughter who is now your faithful scribe, and her children, then of elementary and middle school age. The game went along in predictable fashion until the youngest person on the scene, now the forty something woman referenced in the first paragraph, announced the word snot, whereupon her grandmother declared rather crisply,
"I don't believe I know that word. I don't think that's a word."
"It's a perfectly good word," the grandfather replied. "Don't challenge it."
"No, I don't believe it's a word," she continued. "I have no idea what a word like that means."
"It means a discharge from the nose," he answered calmly and succinctly, whereupon the maker of the word and her brothers dissolved into fits of giggles that nearly sent them out of their wrought-iron furniture onto the floor of the screened-in porch. This is because bodily functions are hilarious to people until they aren't funny at all anymore.
Fast forward to 1986 when the aforementioned elder wordsmith, now twice widowed, had just
married for a third time in a small town in Vermont. After the reception, family members who were staying at a quaint bed and breakfast place gathered around a wood-burning stove to play Trivial Pursuit and another older gentleman kept whispering the answers when it wasn't his turn. This individual is also famous for declining to attend Easter services because he was in church all year long while the folks who showed up only once a year were sleeping in or playing golf. He found the situation just plain unacceptable so he got up early and headed to a beautiful lake for a morning of fishing. I have always found this rather appropriate.
But I digress as I always do. I recall now that my father was approached by a guest at a party during Christmas vacation of my sophomore year in college.
"What's she majoring in?" the guest wanted to know within my earshot.
"She's majoring in Bridge," my father replied in a tone as dry as the Martini he probably was drinking. He was an excellent player, liked to bid no trump a lot, and would find it of particular interest today.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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