“Narrishkeit” means “foolishness” Yiddish (from the German “narr,” as in “narrenschiffe,” ship of fools) – not quite “folly,” like investing with Madoff, but more the kind of idiosyncratic nuttiness of which everybody has a few choice examples. One that Nancy and I share is the way we play Scrabble.
From the beginnings of our relationship (back in what I think of as the early modern era), we’ve both enjoyed games, but there’s always been a problem. When we were engaged, I tried to learn bridge, which Nancy had played in college; we had another couple as partners, a tyro and an old hand, and the whole thing was a disaster. I’m a terrible card player and couldn't learn the game, and the other couple broke up over the acrimony and general fecklessness it engendered in them. Nancy and I tried chess, but she was carrying around a lot of emotional baggage: her father was the senior champion of the state of Michigan, who delighted in thumping his eldest daughter, and playing with me brought those repressed memories back with a vengeance. Whatever we tried, ego intruded and bruised feelings ensued – except when we played Boggle with Danielle who, from the age of 17, has kicked both our butts every time. (Not because of her enormous vocabulary; more because a big part of the game involves spatial relations, seeing various combinations, at which she excels).
But lately, Nancy and I have been playing Scrabble. Well, not Scrabble – a variant called Lexulous, which is offered on Facebook. The difference is that there are eight letters instead of seven and – most important – no challenges; if you make a word that’s not in the game’s “dictionary” (I use the term derisively and loosely), it doesn’t accept it and you can recant and make another word.
Where does the foolishness come in? We could easily set up the Scrabble board and play face to face, but it works better for us to play online. So Nancy sits downstairs in the living room on her Powerbook and I sit at my desk upstairs on my iMac, and when one of us has moved, he or she shouts, “OKAY!” Talk about the machines turning us into machines! But because there’s no eye-contact, no audible grumbling, no muttered imprecations, there are no hard feelings. And we’re about equal in skill, so games are usually decided by who gets the good letters – the right combination of high-powered consonants and vowels.
What’s next? Computer tennis? Virtual sex? Stay tuned.
Phone sex on his-and-her cell phones? But it's true, removing ego and face-to-face imprecations from playing games with one's spouse is a good idea...especially those games that are haunted by childhood demons. I'd love to play scrabble this way. But alas, I hate to lose and frequently do (to my brother, the shallow Hollywood agent). Thus: solitaire is my game of choice.
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