Set Free

E Gary Gygax!

I came late to D&D, in my 40's; you might say I married into it. This is for longtime gamer, Pure Luck, who can't read e-mails at work:

Gary Gygax's Final Quest

After Dinner

The Scene: Our Dining Room
The Players: Songbird, Pure Luck and The Princess
The Game: Scrabble

The Princess: I really miss Scrabble Junior. You just put letters on the board and hoped they would fit.

(A beat.)

Because you didn't know how to spell words.

(Rim shot.)

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Yesterday I got to chaperone a school trip to see our minor league ball team, the Sea Dogs, play at Adorable Mini Stadium Within Walking Distance. The Princess and her friend, Ever-So-Smart, used me as their personal chaperone, and we spent what felt like more time going down for snacks or trips to the restroom then watching the game. Between them they consumed:

2 pieces of cheese pizza
one Sprite
One enormous serving of fried dough, with cinnamon
2 Sea Dog Biscuits (aka a Chipwich)
One large order of fries (also shared with various friends)

They were somehow able to walk back to school, nevertheless.

Because fifth grade girls who are not into watching the game are able to amuse themselves with play-by-play on the behavior of fifth grade boys, I was free to watch baseball.

I need to tell you that none of the men in my household cares much about sports, unless it's the Olympics (and Pure Luck doesn't even care about those). But my dad loved to watch sports, and I loved to watch with him. I knew all about basketball, football, golf, tennis and baseball. When I was a little girl, he took me to see the Senators play, and I saw my hero, Frank Howard. My younger brother was something of a Little League star. The coaches drove four hours to his summer camp to bring him back for a playoff game. But after he went back to camp, he discovered lacrosse, and to general disappointment, he gave up baseball.

I loved baseball. And every time I go to Adorable Mini Stadium Within Walking Distance, I remember how it felt.

There's something hypnotic about it. The ball goes whizzing by, and you try to determine from your odd angle high in the stands why it was a strike and not a ball. You can't help feeling excited when the batter whacks the ball into the air and it goes up, up, up...and even though you might not want the fielders to do poorly, you sigh a little when they make that easy catch.

Several times during the game, the Sea Dogs managed to get a man or two on base, only to suffer their third out and end the inning. There's such a loss of momentum. That would drive me crazy. I look at life as one thing building on another, one level being left behind and another being reached. I count the small movements, record the tiny differences. Baseball is about the grand sweep of things. Baseball has the tiny moments, but they may or may not count at all.

I have two colleagues who love going to the games here. They didn't know each other particularly well, and I mentioned to both of them that they shared an interest. After the next game, one of them said to me he had decided the other guy was okay. Why? Because he, too, was keeping a box score.

Every little thing does count, it seems, but sometimes you can only see how in the greater arc of the season or a career. Sometimes you can only see it in the grander sweep of a life.

As spring becomes summer, and we leave our windows open, we can hear the Star Spangled Banner being sung before each game. We can hear the cheering swell for a home run. Molly runs to hide on the nights they have fireworks. The game feels close enough to touch and smell. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack...

We Got Game

It's been a long wait, but tonight we are gaming. A little snowstorm isn't going to stop us. J and J, the father and son who game with us, have no fear of the 11.5 inches of snow that have fallen thus far and are due to arrive soon.

And for once, I'll be gaming without an incomplete sermon hanging over my head!

When last we met, my character, who is a priestess to the God of Healing in Pure Luck's invented universe, had put her hand in something that made her weird. Clearly my memory is a bit vague. I hope he will set us straight before we get started or that J the father will have noted something in his PDA that will be helpful. J the son is the best friend of #2 Son, a wild-haired boy who plays the double bass in both the orchestra and the jazz band. I have known him since before he was born and remember him as a silent toddler with a halo of blond curls who wore LLBean boots year-round without socks. The curls are longer and darker; the silence has developed into a quiet wit. He feels almost as much ours as our own do. J the father is fun to have at the table, bringing a little more adult energy into the room. We used to sing in the church choir together, and he is a barbershop tenor who sings so high you think his head might explode! He is part of a quartet of guys in their fifties who call themselves The Grateful Dads.

The best thing about gaming is watching Pure Luck play the characters we meet along the way. He has a gift for both doing and writing unique voices.

Dessert tonight will be an assortment of Girl Scout Cookies: Animal Treasures, Peanut Butter Patties, Thin Mints and Caramel Delites. Snow outside, friends inside, cookies on the table--we're happy. We're happy.

More about Scrabble

Now, there are many things about Scrabble that you probably know. You make words out of letters that you draw from a bag, and you try to score as many points as possible. It can be fun, I'm told.

But when you are pathologically competitive, it's not so much fun.

It's not that I want to beat my husband. In fact, the two times I won felt okay, but I wasn't rejoicing or rubbing it in (unlike his mother, who used to do a Victory Dance), I felt only a modest sense of accomplishment.

And now it's worse than ever, because the person I want to beat is me. And I am reminded of all the things in life I've wanted to do well and punished myself for doing poorly. The blood runs white hot through my veins and I know the urge to self-destruct. Once I can see that I'm not going to win, I just want to quit. What's the point?

This is not an attractive aspect of my personality.

But I'm not going to quit playing.

Did you ever read Little Women? Those girls were always playing at Pilgrim's Progress, trying to improve themselves. And I just know that getting a grip on this Scrabble thing is part of my individuation process. (Seven years of Jungian Analysis, and I need more process? Sigh.) There has to be something I can learn from anything that sets me off (or activates a complex, as the analyst would say) in such a powerful way.

When I played Trivial Pursuit with my first husband, he always knew the answers to all the questions in every category, except perhaps Games and Sports. But he never could win, because the dice were always against him. His turns would go on and on, but he could never land on the space you needed to be on to win the little wedge. Someone with better luck would beat him.

I know there is an element of luck in Scrabble, and I can't do anything about that. What drives me crazy is that Pure Luck has a gift for looking at a row of letters and seeing words, and I don't.

Uh-oh. Maybe I *do* feel competitive with him .

In the immortal words of Emily Litella, "Never mind."

Triple Word Score

#2 Son just asked me to watch this little movie about Scrabble, and I wanted to share it with the world.

I lost at Scrabble last night, but I made a creditable showing. If I ever manage to play all seven letters, the way my husband does with alarming frequency, I will retire.

What is your Medieval Personality?

What is your Medieval Personality?

Your distinct personality, The Dreamer-Minstrel might be found in most of the thriving kingdoms of the time. You can always see the "Silver Lining" to every dark and dreary cloud. Look at the bright side is your motto and understanding why everything happens for the best is your goal. You are the positive optimist of the world who provides the hope for all humankind. There is nothing so terrible that you can not find some good within it. On the positive side, you are spontaneous, charismatic, idealistic and empathic. On the negative side, you may be a sentimental dreamer who is emotionally impractical. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.

It is? Heck, this isn't even a useful character type in our D&D game! (Everyone hates the bards. Bards are useless. Or so I am repeatedly told.)

Let the Games Begin

Here's a little story about my mid-life courtship. It was the summer of 2001. Pure Luck and I had known each other for about a year, he had known my children for about six months, and we decided to test the waters for group activities by (wait for it) taking the kids away for a weekend. Off we went to Boothbay Harbor, where we had a horribly bad time. The kids were awful. I thought I would never hear from Pure Luck again. To top it all off, when we went on a Whale Watch, I left the Dramamine at the cottage and found myself throwing up off the back of the boat.

A few days later, when to my utter surprise he had asked me to have lunch, he said, "I'd like to run a game for the boys."

Now one of the fascinating things about Pure Luck, from the boys' point of view, was his history as a gamer. Starting in college, he was really into Dungeons and Dragons. In his twenties and early thirties, he ran a game for a group of friends set in a universe of his own making. He had a collection of teeny little figures and more dice than a casino. This was all meaningless to me, but thrilling to the boys.

We invited a friend of #2 Son's to join us, and so the game began. Pure Luck insisted that I play. Talk about clueless! But play I did, taking on the role of Trillium, a Druid priestess.

Three years have gone by. Last night we played for the first time since #1 Son left for college. We have a new set of characters, and the father of #2 Son's friend plays with us now. I know all about dice and rounds and character sheets and have developed hymns and prayers for my new character Drea Valerian, a priestess of Navarre, the God of Healing. (New uses for those great old Latin hymn tunes!)

We came full circle when the characters boarded a ship to go down the river on our latest adventure. Guess who failed the saving throw and got seasick?