Nobody likes to lose. All that inspirational stuff about the failures you need to endure before achieving success may be true, but let's face it, winning is the ultimate feel-good.
My mother has always kept herself at a safe distance from anything that might put a chink in her armor, if she can help it. More often than not, failure, for my mother, is an un-coiffed head. She avoids heavy wind and she has enough umbrellas to supply a cast of extras in Mary Poppins. She has always kept herself at a safe distance from swimming pools or other large bodies of water -- with the exception of a "swimming with the dolphins" episode when she joined us in Mexico one year. She probably wouldn't risk it again -- the hair wetting, not the dolphin swimming -- but she would be the first to admit that that rare failure was a small price to pay for the bragging rights.
Preternaturally un-athletic, my mother has no trouble avoiding sports of any kind. Still, as a great lover of words, with an encyclopedic vocabulary, she is fiercely competitive and hates to lose. For as long as I have known her, she has always kept herself at a safe distance from a Scrabble board. She would just rather not play.
I, on the other hand, am competitive but very accustomed to losing, and will play anything -- as long as it's not a contact sport. (With the exception of a short ice hockey stint in my early forties, but I got to wear a lot of padding and that's a story for another time.) Like my mother, I am a lover of words, with an adequate if not encyclopedic vocabulary. I remember well the day my father came home with an ingeniously futuristic edition of Scrabble, mounted on a lazy Susan, its plastic surface landscaped with rectangular depressions so the tiles would stay in place with each spin. We kept each other honest with a dictionary close at hand. We leveled the playing field with an egg timer. I loved the rutted, revolving Scrabble board, except for when I got the urge to dump all the tiles off in a rage and fold the thing up in an emphatic act of defiance.
Scrabble was a family thing, played at the kitchen table. Other than sneaking a peak at the tile rack of the relative to your left, there were few opportunities for cheating. There are just so many trips you can make to the "bathroom" before everyone gets suspicious. It's why, I suppose, I always reserved the right to dump and fold. Not cheating so much as loss avoidance. You can't lose if nobody finishes. This, recall, was long ago, before conventional wisdom assured all us kids with fragile psyches that everybody is a winner, and nobody is keeping score. Yeah right.
These days, a good game of Scrabble is accessible to everybody at all times, day or night. Need to go out to dinner or attend a class or go grocery shopping? No problem, no egg timer required, no need for thumb twiddling. Words with Friends can travel with you anywhere. Your turn lasts as long as you need it to. Your opponent can play with someone else while you're gone. And -- as I just found out -- you can cheat. Not everybody can be a winner, but, if it's that important, you can be a Words with Friends "one to beat." You can become a legend, not just in your own mind, but in the collective, envious mind of your circle of friends who play.
I have never played Words with Friends. Maybe it's because I get a headache staring at my cell phone screen, maybe it's just because I have precious few friends. Maybe I'm becoming my mother, and I would rather not play than lose. It never occurred to me that I could simply cheat. Sheds a whole new light on things.
Maybe. There is something to be said for earning arrogance. I think there is anyway; I'm still waiting for confirmation. To me, surreptitiously relying on some computer app to rearrange an impossible set of letters into an obscure word is a bit short sighted. It seems like liposuction -- a quick fix without any long term satisfaction.
Then again, maybe long term satisfaction is overrated. I'm always up for an experiment, but I'll start slowly. Maybe there's an app for cheating at spider solitaire.
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