Category: culture

Scrabble

I just read a story in the news about Allan Simmons. That’s Britain’s best-known Scrabble champion. Among other distinctions Mr. Simmons is the former Chairman of the World English Language Scrabble Players Association and has written half a dozen books on the subject.

Just let that sink in for a second. He writes entire books about Scrabble, six of them so far.

Anyway, Mr. Simmons has been banned from international competition for three years because he allegedly violated official rules governing the blind selection of letter tiles. These rules are very detailed and specific. He says he didn’t cheat but he admits the procedure is so wonky he might have picked tiles out of the well protected bag with his palm facing south or northwest or something like that, who cares? Well, he doesn’t and that’s what I love about the story.

Did I mention that he’s written six books about Scrabble? I think that’s amazing.

?How many of us would put all of our life’s work, no matter how insignificant it may seem to others, behind us and just move on?

Allan Simmons is 60 and ready for a new start. I think that’s inspirational.

?The meaningful things in your life don’t leave you. It’s the other way around.

Christmas from the attic

Carolann and I spent this past weekend getting Christmas out of the attic.

She goes up and hands everything down to me, box after box of Christmas treasures we’ve collected together for nearly thirty years.

A lot of people these days hire professional house light hangers.

They do a beautiful job. Too good, if you ask me. Everything’s weirdly perfect. And it’s expensive.

And I think there’s something wrong about sitting inside the warm house watching TV while strangers decorate your yard. Wrong for me, anyway.

We used most of what we’ve had for decades: boxes of tangled, ancient light strands in various sizes, some all-white, some multi-colored; some working, some not. We have one light in the line of dozens along the driveway that flashes. Just one. That’s fine.

Decorating tip: dangling cords can be hidden behind brick columns.

We didn’t do any precise planning. We sort of decided where to put stuff as we went. The pros get their work done in a couple of hours or less, I guess. We spent two days and part of a third. We’re still not sure we’ve finished.

Through the process we made three or four trips to the big box hardware store and wound up spending almost as much money as we would have for the professionally perfect jobs though ours is a decidedly unprofessional result.

It’s a bit of this and that but I like it.

We’re proud that we have no giant blowup characters powered by air at night but left to puddle, lifeless, all over the yard during the day.

See, to passersby our Christmas display is just another mish-mash of color and cords I suppose but to us it represents Christmases past, when our kids were little and we were young.

It means absolutely everything to us.

Our house, self-decorated. Perfect in its imperfections.