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Boggle party
Sunday, October 7 2001
I was down on 7th Avenue in Park Slope Brooklyn today and saw that one of the roving black hatted Jews had finally come upon someone who was willing to admit that he was Jewish and that he had not yet shaken of the lulov or smelled of the esrog. He was a little boy, about seven years old, and there he was being patiently guided through these ancient rituals, rituals whose origins have long been lost in the fog of history. For a moment there I actually felt a little envious. On some level I wished that I too was part of an exclusive minority culture full of strange rituals, rituals I was expected to perform but not understand. Someone else in this culture, someone more zealous than me, would track me down somewhere during the course of my busy day and make me stick both fingers up my nose and gargle of the sweet water of cold sassafras tea while imagining wheat fields blowing on the plains of the Argentine. Passersby wouldn't even look at me twice; it would just be another day in New York City.
Gretchen was busy preparing for a little get-together we'd be hosting tonight, so, in fits of sloth-induced guilt, I occasionally responded by doing "chores" - taking out the trash or helping to sand down the discolored surface of the dining room table. The table had been sanded on several occasions in the past, no doubt as a hurried straightening-up procedure on evenings exactly like this one. There were big discolored circles, unsightly grey-stained spills, and little droplets of a mysterious red dye that had nestled deeply among the fibers. We did the best we could with the harshest sandpaper we could find, tossing our dustpans of white sawdust into the harsh winds blowing past the back door. The table looked better now. But perhaps more importantly, even less of its protective varnish remained. The next time we sand it, we'll find ourselves working three times as long for the same modest results.
The get-together was to be a Boggle party, centered around the game Boggle DeluxeTM. While regular Boggle has a square board consisting of 16 cubes of letters, Boggle DeluxeTM features 25 cubes. So many words can be unraveled in the regulation three minutes that only those consisting of more than three letters count. Gretchen made all sorts of little cookies and snacks for the "party" and I went out to buy beers (even though few of those coming over actually drink much alcohol). Then we sat around jokingly wondering if anyone would actually come to our party.
Well, people did come. It was mostly Ray's friends from the pot luck a week ago, along with Gretchen's poet friend Deborah. There were so many of us that we had to break into two tables. As usual, I didn't play that well, especially after I'd been drinking. But I was also drinking coffee and when I'd lay off the booze and stick to the coffee my scores would immediately improve. My best performances were in cases where there were six of us playing around a single Boggle set. Though I'm not especially fast and don't tend to get many words, an unusually large number of the ones I do tend to be overlooked by the others, who in their equally-good performance tend to cancel out one another. I can tell that some of them, Ray for example, have played a lot of Boggle. They glance at the board, put their heads down and write three or four words before looking up again. Meanwhile I'm still in a daze of "Hey, there are words here!"
Though the Boggle itself is plenty fun, better still is the conversation spawned by the words and the near-words we would find. "Look, there's AFRO!" "Look, there's AFRICANAMERICAN!" "Look, there's SPIC! And WOP!" "Hey, it says KIKE!" "Look, PORCHMONKEY!" (AFRO was the only one that had actually been there.)
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