Scrabulicious

July 16th, 2008 by Sally | Posted in ACKtivity |

Yesterday I had a rude awakening from my Facebook-induced delusion that I was good at games. I should have known better, since my childhood was plagued by maddening run-ins with the Pfeifers, my Mensa-certified, gaming relatives on my mother’s side, who, from Grandpa Blue to Uncle Bootie on down, barraged my every visit to Little Rock with word puzzle, maze, and card trick challenges that I could never solve before throwing in the towel in tearful frustration.

It turns out that Scrabulous – Facebook’s version of Scrabble — is a lot easier than old skool board game Scrabble, especially with all that delicious access to the Two-Letter Word List and FreeDictionary.com, so you can try out fake words way before your opponent would ever challenge you. My old friend, Ellie, and I tried out Scrabble on the beach outside her sister’s house yesterday, having played each other on Facebook Scrabulous to great success (I can’t remember whose success just now, just “success” in the sense of fun.) The lack of those online cheats was coupled by the pressure of a live opponent, waiting for me to finish my move. I hate that. I feel bad, she feels bad, I feel stupid. Plus, real life games require concentration. You can’t chat. And beachside, with an old friend, is about chatting.

Ellie and I had reconnected five months ago after a 10-year hiatus. I can’t remember why we had lost touch – we had been very good friends before, when we worked at “Conan” together in that first trying year it was on the air – but I guess some aspect of our friendship had gotten too intense, as it happens sometimes in your 20s, when you don’t know what you want or how to get it, and you end up blaming the people you’re closest to. Since our reunion as grown-ups, we had had a wine bar catch-up in the West Village, a dinner in Los Angeles, and now, time together in Nantucket. Of course, we had each other’s phone numbers, if we had wanted to call over the years, but we hadn’t – or we didn’t, anyway. And finding each other on Facebook seemed like a risk-free social experiment; you kind of softly lob the message/”friend request” out there, rather than the seemingly more confrontational phone call. When Ellie wrote back that it was the best thing that had happened to her so far on the site, I was surprised and so pleased, my heart warming like a freshman winning approval from the cool senior.

The beach chat between Scrabble moves was the most relaxed yet. I guess it takes 3 or 4 times to get back into a groove with certain people. (But how do you really get back into a groove, when the groove you were in before was that of two single, ambitious, angst-ridden, searching twenty-somethings? I felt myself darting around the fear of judgment, so palpable then and now, like yet another game I couldn’t complete.) So, it’s essentially starting over. You cover the broad strokes (“Did you watch ‘The Wire?’”), make assumptions about growth on both sides (“therapy”…”work”…”I try not to let it bug me when…”), and then just let the comfortable feeling of having known and respected someone before wash over you, like the kiddie waves at the shore beyond, teeming with the hope that all of it can be restored, without going too deep.

After many distracted, 4-letter moves, we opted to forfeit the game, folding it up back into the box — thankfully, with no digital score kept in perpetuity; just some unused, sandy Ps and Qs put back in their Mylar pouch.

But I’m pretty sure, if we had kept the score, Ellie would have been way ahead. It turns out I am not good at games.