On Scrabble and Studying

An homage to my mom

A number of years ago I thought I’d finally go to college, and in that first semester I enrolled in an English class. I was assigned an essay topic that I cannot remember. The product was this essay on the formative influence — in terms of both cognitive ability and virtue — that a particular board game had on me, and not just the board game but the one with whom it was played: my mom. I didn’t make it past that inaugural semester of my would-be college education but I saved this essay to share it on a future Mother's Day, so here it is for your enjoyment and her honor.

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From Unsplash.

There were many things I knew about my mother growing up, but two things in particular had already sunken deep, deep down to the level of my bones by an early age. Firstly, each time we sat down at the coffee table to play Scrabble as a family, my mother’s iron fist was going to descend as a hammer on us vernacular peasants. Secondly, when my mother ascended the steps of consonants and vowels to sit on her throne of carefully constructed words—from which she overlooked her land of books and rhymes and vocabulary to see that all remained well—she was going to guard the source of her power as swiftly and handily as she was going to dole out her queenly justice. Any time she would place a word on the board that I didn’t know (which was not an infrequent occurrence) I would ask, “What does that word mean?” To which came the inevitable, royal response: “Look it up.” Look it up? I would think to myself. “But I don’t want to look it up, mom. Just tell me what it means!” My mother would gaze down at me from her throne, chanting her eternal refrain, “If you want to know the meaning, then grab a dictionary and look it up.” Her treatment of me in my young years directly affected the person I would become, both in my study habits and in my love of words.

My mother’s stern response, which felt something like an unjust punishment at the time, was possibly the most important thing she ever did for me: she validated my questions and ennobled them by giving them a path down which to travel. Rather than shutting me down by giving me the answer to each lazy query, she cleverly fostered a relentless sense of curiosity, the importance of which I am only just beginning to recognize and appreciate. Curiosity is the catalyst by which we tread the well-worn trails of discovery, and, in my case, those paths consistently wound their way through dictionaries, encyclopedias, and search engines.

In fact, friends have called me the “human Google” which, aside from being a bit of an overstatement, is a reference to my general breadth of knowledge. “How do you know all of this stuff?” I am asked this question often. The answer is simple, and each time I speak it aloud I hear my mother’s voice speaking through my own: I looked it up. I do not allow the green shoot of curiosity to remain untended, but I water it with facts and fertilize it with legend and expose it to the radiant light of truth and, slowly but surely, the young sprout grows into the strong tree of knowledge. Looking it up, it turns out, wasn’t simply a tactic to expand my vocabulary and win the next round of Scrabble: it was a pattern for life and was shaping who I was as a person.

From those early family moments around the coffee table was born in me not only a thirst for knowledge that I would learn to quench, but also a love for reading that has waxed and waned with the seasons of life although it has never once left my being entirely. Reading has opened to me landscapes, worlds, experiences, doors, lives, universes that I would have otherwise been unable to engage with in my one life. Reading has allowed me to study the lives of exemplars in faith and morals, to witness virtue enacted in difficult circumstances whether they be fact or fiction, to grasp an interior sense of purpose that I could begin to articulate precisely because the language had been given to me through these books. Scrabble taught me that words have value: not just the point value assigned for the purposes of winning the game, but as vehicles of meaning by which we come to participate in something beyond ourselves. The more words I could learn, the greater the sense of meaning I could acquire for myself.

The ancient adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” has a certain amount of truth to it, but if one image is worth one-thousand words, then one-thousand words are worth their weight in gold. My mother wielded them to great effect in her domination of the Scrabble board, but to even greater effect in her slow, patient shaping of my life. What felt to a young peasant boy like tyrannical power in the hands of a cruel queen came to be understood as the tough love of a mother for her son. To this day, I still have not ousted my mother from her word-laden throne.

I am not sure I ever will.

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