Cribbage

The game Scrabble is a dark stain on our marriage. I like playing Scrabble, but only indulge in it a few times per year with my mom or sister. Why not with my life-partner, you ask?

Our collaborative Scrabble game off to a swimming start.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Matthew can be real vexing when playing Scrabble. Like most serious gamers, he's pedantic about rules (finds the house rules I grew up with to be "a joke"), intensely competitive, and - here it is - just too good. First he's breathing down your neck for looking up a two-letter word that starts with K, then plops down all his letters and gets a 50-point bonus. We try to revive this dead horse about once annually, because maybe things will be different and wouldn't it be fun to play Scrabble by the fire? Last year's game ended abruptly - both of us deeply annoyed - when I yelled fine!, upended the board, and left to take an unrepentant bath. You see, I'm also vexing and we're neither of us pushovers which is why we are MADE. FOR. EACH. OTHER.

Today we are sitting on the patio and attempting a first-ever collaborative Scrabble game. On these founding principles we agree: We shall not track individual points, but rather attempt to earn the highest total points between us, like two people who love each other. We shall not make use of the Scrabble Dictionary at all, but rather any dubious word must be approved by both parties. We shall limit trading in our bad letters to only once per person per game. We shall build up, not tear down, for we are not merely making the highest communal score we can, we are also making a marriage. Let us commence. 

Then Matthew started the game off with WOK and I could only play FOB in response, so here we are now, two of the biggest knuckleheads in Malawi, REAPING WHAT WE HAVE SOWED.

Cribbage, by contrast, is a game that brings us together. The summer we met, Matthew and I worked at a small Mennonite camp near the Boundary Waters (Ely-side). It seems hard to believe now, but he was only 24 and I was 30, just a cougar living her best life. I'd flown home from Mozambique a year prior, broke as a joke, and was living in Molly & Kyle's spare room, somehow trying to grow prairie grass indoors and taking nursing prereqs at the University of Minnesota. I took the summer off to be a cook at the camp. Matthew rolled up from Goshen in a rusted-out Honda Civic to be a canoe guide and live closer to his parents for a few months. 

I was suspicious of him because he did yoga in the morning, which seemed a bit too on point for a guy with a ponytail. However, we were assigned to be paddle-partners for the staff trip at the start of the season, and there was no denying we got on well. "Let's pretend we're Lewis and Clark," I suggested to a practical-stranger that first day, and instead of rolling his eyes, we spent an hour clarifying their names and who would play whom. Meriwether was a no-brainer (I dibsed him); but Clark... hmm. Clark, Clark, Clark... what was his first name again? (We were in the wilderness, and anyhow, our phones had no internet in 2010.) We eventually settled on Roger, Roger Clark the famous explorer, and Matthew assumed his character admirably, which I liked very much indeed.

(There was another staffer on that trip who also did morning yoga, but he requested a photo shoot of himself saluting the sun on some rocks just beyond the shoreline, dramatic skyline behind him, so at least Matthew wasn't doing that sort of thing.)  

In between taking Mennonite groups out on wilderness trips, he and I settled into a companionable state of getting to know one another. He tested me on the correct pronunciation of character names from The Silmarillion, which I intuited was important to him and I knew the answers to. He showed up when and where he promised, which was important to me. Things really broke open over breakfast when I casually asked if he wanted to play cribbage. "I thought you'd NEVER ask!" he replied, delighted. We became an item soon after. 

Cribbage is a key detail in our Marriage Origin story, in other words, and it has remained a nice point of connection for us through years of kids and jobs and the terrible rat-race which is American capitalism - boooooooooooooo!! You may even be able to assess the health of our relationship by whether we're getting in a few hands over breakfast or not. We rarely have time except on weekends - that is, unless we're living overseas, where the thrall of said capitalism is viewed more suspiciously. 

I've never lived in Europe so I can't speak to that; but in developing countries where almost no one owns a car, you work very close to where you live. Minus commute time, traffic, and the hustle hustle hustle to get out the door and make bank (plus if feral dogs wake you up at 6 AM), you have plenty of time to play cribbage with your hubby, or backgammon with your children, every day of the week. When you live overseas you invariably get lonely and cribbage can also fill some of that time without a robust social life. 

When we moved to Bolivia, Lev was 10 months old and Thea was 2 1/2. We were prisoners to our young children's needs, housebound during naps and early bedtimes, so we decided to turn all our cribbage-playing into a tournament, which we called The Bolivia Cup. We kept a record of wins & losses on our kitchen window, using erasable bathtub crayons that someone had gifted our kids. When I won it - to my immense satisfaction, I'm also very competitive - one and a half years later, Matthew surprised me with a present: He asked a local leatherworker to craft a custom case to hold our small cribbage board and a deck of cards, with the details of the tournament inscribed on it. Best gift ever. 

We're well into the Malawi Cup ("Kapu kwa Malawi") and things are not looking good for me. I'm losing sixteen games to seven. It's going to take a lot of cribbage razzle-dazzle to make up a deficit like that. 

Somehow it does not bother me (much). It's the pleasure of the mornings on the patio that matters most, eating our eggs and toast together, sipping Nescafe, finding card combinations that add up to 15 or 31, bemoaning poor cuts, letting the kids offer advice on what cards to keep or throw in the crib. It's a great game, cribbage. A loving game, even when the competition is fierce, as ours always is.

Very unlike this disastrous attempt to play collaborative Scrabble. I'm writing this during his turns and he's birding in the yard during my turns. We're both getting annoyed at the other's inattention. We managed to collaborate ourselves past those dismal starting words, but the magic simply isn't here. 

Matthew finally leveled with me: "I don't like this game. Just keep playing it with your mom and sister." 

"Awesome, since neither of them are here with me," I responded, cross. 

We are pausing it to cook dinner but we probably won't finish. The board is now on the bookshelf, wedged beside a small book about the Sermon on the Mount, which gives me pause. 

"Blessed are the peacemakers," Jesus tried to explain while hanging out with his bros, "for they will be called Children of God." In the background, I think it's fair to surmise, his disciples were not huddled over a Scrabble board, arguing whether KU is a valid word. Or maybe they were and that's what made Jesus think of it. 

"Did you hear me?" he may have repeated over the hubbub, getting a little louder. "I SAID... CHILDREN. OF. GOD!" 

If they were anything like Matthew and me, that's definitely how it went down.

"Ugh," he probably sighed, pressing on his eyelids. "Or just consider playing a round of cribbage instead?"

Postscript: the kids discovered our abandoned board the next day and I captured the moment Lev placed his first Scrabble word ever (SO), followed by Thea (OF). They seem to love it. As a relational metric, they're doing way better than us.