Sue Spitulnik

Today is National Scrabble Day. I have a pretty good handle on the American language and most of the time can spell a word correctly, but winning at Scrabble has never been one of my strong suits.

When my children were young and we played board games, before the advent of gadgets, we liked to play Scrabble. My son is very competitive and he generally won, or got mad when he didn’t. Like I said, I’m a pretty good speller, but he would figure out a way to utilize the double and triple word score squares in very unique ways that never crossed my radar. When I would get stuck he would offer to help me because I was taking too long. He’d look at my letters and have two or three words when I couldn’t see one. It was sort of depressing, him being the kid and all.

Today, people play “Words With Friends” on their phones. When I first got a smart phone, I had planned to find some playing partners, but I was with a friend whose phone beeped every other sentence we spoke, because she had so many games going, and she admitted she rarely won. I remembered playing with  my son and decided I didn’t always want to be the loser, and I had better things to do with my time, or so I convinced myself. Maybe, just maybe, I was unwilling to find out if I would lose. Whatever the reason, I have never played. Now I’m feeling like I have missed something. There is a possibility with all the writing I have done, I would be a better player, maybe I need to download the ap and find a partner. (Just not my son.)

I think it’s sad we don’t play board games like Scrabble anymore. It wasn’t really the game that was important, it was all the people time that went with it that I miss.