my dad loves and hates scrabble. he loves the idea of playing it and hates
playing it. i should clarify. he loves the challenge of it and hates the
frustration. he does seem to have a peculiar knack for frequently having 7
vowels at once. fortunately i haven't inherited _that_ trait.

well, THAT was interesting!... we have just played the first game (in our family
at least) of six-letter blitz scrabble. it's like regular scrabble except we
take only six letters instead of seven. the reason for doing this is that it was
close to bedtime but we wanted to squeeze one more quick game in and for some
reason we thought using only six letters would speed it up. i'm not sure it did,
but we played quickly anyway because we all wanted to go to bed. we agreed on
the rule that using all six letters resulted in a 25 point bonus.

by 'we' i mean myself, my brother, and my dad. dad and i are longtime
scrabblers. my brother on the other hand is a surprise contender. when last i
lived with him, he was not interested in or talented at such things. he has a
grade nine education and has spent most of his adult life in prison. he was in
prison more or less during the same six years i was in grad school. (indeed, the
parallel is quite striking.) we've both moved back home quite recently, and i'm
really just getting re-acquainted with him. with his grim tattoo, large muscles,
and shaved head, you would think him much more at home at a nightclub entrance
than a scrabble board. but in fact he has a knack for arithmetic and a large
playing vocabulary. his special talent is making seven-letter words. he gets at
least one every game. but in between these humdingers his play is quite
lackadaisical, so more often than not i catch him by the end of the game.

we take our scrabble quite seriously, so this first instance of six-letter
scrabble is an historic occasion. or at least i'm making it so, because i won by
quite a whopping margin: 290-142-135. between the three of us, i win about half
of the time, but it's usually close. they're pretty good, those two. the way it
ended was quite spectacular, if anything in scrabble can be spectacular. after a
slow start, i suddenly pulled ahead by planting CHIVEY on a triple word score --
63 points. it's a bit questionable, but if oniony and garlicky are words, then
surely chivey is. next i used up a Q i had little use for. as the play came
around again, i was trying to figure out what to do with SPEXAE. ax? axes?
triple letter score anywhere? then it hit me. with APEXES i emptied my rack, hit
another triple word score, got the 25 point bonus, and -- as we found out while
dad was punctually playing his prepared word and i groped the empty bag 
-- ended the game, stranding both my opponents with full racks and 
garnering an additional 19 points for myself. 'WHAT?' he thundered. 'are 
you sure there aren't some missing letters lying around somewhere? we 
can't be out already.'

you can see why my dad hates scrabble.