Michael D. Davis

I am gonna tell ya the story of last weekend. To do this, we need to travel back a little bit.

In the time of my groovy adolescence, when my peers were playing shoot ’em up games on their little Nintendos or whatever, I was playin’ board games. My Ma never allowed video games in my house past pong and Pacman, and I thank her for it, but I digress.

Now, we weren’t one of those game night families ya see on TV where everyone is sittin’ around with painful smiles, laughin’ at Old Unky Joe’s charade’s guess. No, we are much worse. For the Davis family, it is impossible to have a regular game night because usually, by the end of a few rounds of Uno, someone was screaming, another was accused of cheating, and every expletive known to man had been strung together into one incoherent impressive sentence. We then would not play again for at least another two weeks.

Nowadays, It’s mostly down to me and my sister. We mix it up and play different things here and there, but our go-to, our sport of choice, is Scrabble. I consider myself a very good Scrabble player because, as I’ve said before, I like words. However, I pale in comparison to my sister. This is because she lives it. What I mean by that is her personal lexicon is two tiers above the rest of us. Simply listening to my sister improved my vocabulary in school, because I had to look up the three-dollar word she used to call me a moron.

It is almost like she has a syllable quota. Where a half-syllable word would suffice, she throws in a six-syllable word just because she can. For example, I am certain that my sister has used the word ‘indubitably’ in a sentence. It’s this side of my sister that gets annoyed when she sees my dropped G’s and my constant use of the word ‘Ya’ in these columns.

All this takes us to last weekend. My sister and I played four games together, three of which were word games. We played Bananagrams, Upwords, and of course, Scrabble. A good game of Scrabble or Upwords between the two of us can take well over an hour, bordering on two. This is because of our strategies, which are polar opposites. Me, I throw out a word fast, the first or second word I think of. It usually doesn’t take me more than a minute to throw some tiles on the board.

My sister, I’ve seen her take 40 minutes, studying her tiles, trying to think of every possible word capable, word sweat forming on her brow.

My sister takes long turns, not only because she’s really concentrating and thinking up those twenty-syllable words, but because she’s coming up with words no one has heard of. For example, this weekend, she put down the word ‘pram’. After I challenged the word and failed. I learned there are only two types of people that use this word, One, people who talk like my sister, and Two, residents of 1884.

This one time a couple of years ago, I was winning at Scrabble. I mean, really kicking A. And suddenly, the tray and the Scrabble board go flying through the air. My sister had leaned a little too hard on one side. She claims an accident, I say malicious intent. She saw me winning and couldn’t take it.

Either way, we lost a letter ‘I’ that day, it has since been replaced by a dwarf malformed wood square with a hand-drawn ‘I’ on it, that stands out like a canary in a bowl of soup.

This weekend, we played about a dozen rounds of the four board games, and I lost every game. But honestly, I don’t care, I just like to play. Win or lose, It’s always good fun — even if we are threatenin’ and swearin’ at each other.

P.S. Pram means baby carriage for those of you as ignorant as me.