A SQUATLO STORY: NUMBER TWENTY-THREE (The Scrabble Ledger... a withered parchment detailing one man's futility)

           Early on in my relationship with Mrs. Squatlo it became common knowledge that I couldn't beat her at the game of Scrabble, at least not often enough to suit my fragile ego.  We would play game after game, and despite my best efforts she would pound the living shit out of me, game after game.  Now, I don't think I have a bad vocabulary, and with any luck at all from the Hooey Gods who control the tiles pulled from the letter bag, I can usually hold my own with most mortals.  But this woman has "owned" my butt in the vast majority of our competitions, something I still have trouble dealing with and can't accept.
             At some point during our twenty year relationship I began to improve, and one night was having a particularly successful streak.  I think I had actually won four or five straight games, something that has occurred only once or twice in my favor in all those years of competition.  In boasting about my new found prowess, I made the mistake of saying we had reached a point of parity, that my game had reached the level of hers, and from now on the luck of the draw would probably be the deciding factor between victory and defeat.  She laughed and laughed...  I took her blatant disrespect as a challenge and suggested we begin a ledger to keep track of our wins and losses, a list we would mark after each game and refer to later for proof of my improvement. 
             Worst suggestion of my life... What began as a simple challenge to "keep score" of the outcomes of our games has since become a thing of ridicule for me, and I've been tempted to destroy the evidence on more than one occasion.  My wife, on the other hand, sees that ledger as documented proof of her superiority, and finds great pleasure in marking her wins with a flourish and appropriate commentary with every swipe of the pen.
             Our obsession with the game knows no bounds.  We once stopped on our way to a vacation chalet in the mountains, driving for hours on congested interstates, just to answer a challenge one of us had made in the car.  A rest area happened to be close by, and for about two hours we pounded away at one another on a picnic table alongside the freeway... arriving late to our chalet, where the competition began again in earnest (this time with B52's and shots of Crown).
              We've even carried a full-sized Scrabble board in our luggage on vacation to Costa Rica, where we spent hours of our trip safe from the rain under a tiki hut near an open bar, marking the ledger with each game's conclusion.  Tourists from half a dozen countries would stop by to watch, and before long others began to show up with their own Scrabble games, some of them in Spanish.

                As it turned out, escaping the rain at an all inclusive rain forest resort (in between two hurricanes) wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a vacation in Costa Rica.  In fact, the game introduced us to dear friends from Germany with whom we've stayed in touch and exchanged mail and gifts in the years since that trip.  Quite a few conversations were started with total strangers who were attracted to our competition, and who would often sit at our table to watch the fireworks that would follow my every defeat.

                I've become philosophical about my obvious lack of prowess at this silly game... I truly believe the Scrabble Gods poison the tile bag whenever it's my turn to reach inside for a draw.  My wife will invariably pull the "killer letters", the "X", the "Z", the "J", and the "Q", both of the blanks, and two or three of the four "S"s, leaving me to fight my way toward defeat with a tray that often looks like this: "C, V, V, I, I, E, I" or "K, V, I, C, G, I, U"...    I'd suggest a corresponding ledger to document this wealth disparity in the distribution of workable letters, but I fear it would prove as damning as the original ledger...

       

            Since starting the ledger many years ago, that small scrap of legal paper has become as tattered and fragile as an ancient parchment, and we've often said we should transpose the balance sheet to another, less worn document.  But still it's with us, on every day trip, or camping excursion, or vacation, growing ever more battered and tattered with every handling.
             Some traditions are painful to look at, but fun to remember...