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	Anniversary Scrabble In our household, Scrabble is a blood sport. Some marriage therapists insist that two people who claim to be writers should not try to inhabit the same home. Competitive pressures become too strong. My wife Diana and I ignore this advice. We occasionally increase the competition by placing a Scrabble board between us. Surely common sense should have told us not to bring out the word game on our anniversary?a day that had been, so far, pleasant. Admitting the dangers, we proceeded. The box was opened, and there lay the evidence of why this activity was a bad idea. The score sheet from our previous encounter was on top. Diana had won? embarrassed me by the margin of sixty points! That score sheet was evidence of a reality with which I have learned to live. Diana?s spelling skills far exceed mine. When she writes, she consults a memory bank rich in words. When I write, I consult a thesaurus. This puts me at a painful disadvantage whenever we play Scrabble. I place my tiles on the board with trepidation, steeled against her challenge. On average, once a game I find that my effort at word building has resulted in no word at all, only in an approximation of something I know how to pronounce but not how to spell. Nonetheless, I occasionally win. I have learned to play with more guile than skill. I am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to use all seven tiles so I can reap the fifty-point bonus. I hoard combinations of ?ing? or ?ion? when they appear in my hand, for I see them as a chance to put together the really big one. I am undeterred by the fact that this strategy works against me more often than it works for me. Our anniversary game began with both of us frustrated by poor combinations of letters. Then my luck changed. I found myself holding both blank tiles, plus a precious ?s.? With this combination, any third-grade student should have been able to arrange all seven letters into one word. Indeed, the word ?insured? emerged on the board, and I was comfortably ahead. Diana is not easily discouraged. Skillfully using three and four point letters, she rallied. With only a few tiles remaining to be drawn, she was only eighteen points behind. I braced myself for a repeat of a common pattern: I spend most of the game ahead, only to be overtaken and defeated in the last few minutes. My heart sank further when, with the board almost full, I drew both the ?q? and the ?z? from the pile. What can one do with those rare letters, when the options are so limited? This, however, was my night for good fortune. I managed to find three-letter words that attached to what had already been played and utilized both my ten-point letters. My lead expanded again, and I coasted home with a wide margin. Then the question: would the aura of an anniversary day, or even the marriage itself, survive my surprise, uneven win? Diana played her final letter. I subtracted my one, unused tile, and did the math. The margin of victory: exactly sixty points. On the scorecard that contained our last two games, one was a mirror image of the other. My gloating was muted. Both the day and the marriage survived. After forty-eight years, the score was tied. Or, perhaps, the score sheet could be read another way. In marriage and in Scrabble, both of us had won.
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Jack Good
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