Murphy Henry
(See Blog of September 6 for disclaimer re grammar.)
I just got back from seeing my folks on my monthly trip to Georgia. I’ve mentioned before that both my parents, who are 84 and 84, have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Thanks to some wonderful new meds, Aricept and Namenda, they are both still hanging in there.
Mama, especially, was having a very good weekend and before I left today for the 9 hour drive back we played a game of Scrabble. She beat me! By a substantial margin! I can’t say I was trying my hardest, but I wasn’t slacking off much, either. Early on, I was reading out the score and I said, with some surprise, “You’re ahead of me!”
She says, “The lead is where I like to be.”
I will try to describe for you her most excellent play because I am so happy she thought of it. (Get out your pencils and paper…and that’s the only time you’ll hear me say that!)
She had, early on, put down the word “filth,” which was played vertically. Then I had crossed “filth” at the “h” with “white.” Later, I’d used the “w” of “white” to make “wring,” also vertically. (Got that written down?) So, here comes Mama, armed with an “f” and a “y”. She puts the “f” in front of the “r” in “wring.” She then adds the “y” on the other side to make “fry.” And by doing that she also ends up with “filthy” for a nice fat score! I said, “Mama, you’re killing me!”
“Good,” she says. “Good, good, good.”
Then there was this. She is thinking really hard about her next play. I’m over there reading the Scrabble dictionary and I hear her say something, but I couldn’t understand what it was and didn’t think much of it.
She looks up and says, “Did I just say damn?”
I say, “I don’t know.” (I’ve never heard my mother cuss in my life.)
She says, “If I did, I take it back.”
I say, “If you really want to take it back, you’d have to say it backwards.”
She says, “That would be ‘mad’.” (Which is pretty impressive, I think.)
However, I am a stickler, so I say, “Actually that would be ‘n-mad’.” But by then she has moved on and I wish I hadn’t made that slight correction. Who cares?
For all practical purposes the game was over when she used the “q” on the triple word score to make “que” and racked up 36 points. (Yes, I know “que” is not a word and that the real word is “queue” but our family has been using “que” for “queue” ever since I conned my younger sisters into believing it was spelled that way.)
On her final turn, Mama used up all her letters and went out. When I totaled up the final score it was 310 to 214. I said, “Mama, you beat me!”
She replied, “Too bad. I’m so sorry.”
But I knew she wasn’t! And I wasn’t either. It was a wonderful game, and I have a wonderful Mama! You go, Mama Pajama!
