ScrabBlues

My life for the past few weeks was a restless wait from one weekend to next; hoping to get some sought after sunshine and enjoy the gelid weather through warm layers of sweaters, walking down the crowded streets with aromatic hot coffee. Ousting the prophecies of global warming and the like, this time around, the characteristic New England winter is here to stay in all its passion and variegation.

It has always amazed me, how nature controls ones life style in this part of the globe; how one acclimatizes to avoid excessive slumber, regulate the diet cycle, keep up gym resolutions, indulge oneself to avoid the pangs of depression the gloomy season can leave on you. It was on one such mission that poker had become customary on cold weekends last winter. This year with the core circle of poker friends strewn around the country, how the winter would unwind is a question mark.

As much as I love the chill and the intermittent snow it brings, finding the lack of daylight at 3 pm can be most difficult part of adapting. To top it is the perfect slowdown of life’s pace that, even the fifty minute drive to the remote theatre playing Om Shanti Om can be accounted as fruitful activity on a winter weekend.

It brings to my mind the science text book of third std., when I had memorized on a sultry warm November of Trivandrum, what people do in winter – wear warm clothes, drink hot soups, sit around a fire after early sunset and play indoor games. As if going by the book, we have been cashing on new adult games of taboo, scrabble and clue for that imperative wintry caffeine fix.

After the reviving of scrabble many years hence, I have also managed to remain hooked to its better alternative; scrabulous on facebook. Here the urge to cheat on cooked up words is carefully denied. And somehow learning a new word seems exciting again and even better when you are winning the game against your worst opponent when you were eight. Though a passing winter amusement, I am sure group games are in, for a while to come.

It is wonderful and intimidating all at the same time, how life is once again coming back in a circle; when games made friends at eight, you move on to teens shunning snakes and ladders as child’s play and as the mellowed tweens (as Div coined it) set in, games keep the friend circle chirpier than three hours of gossip over coffee or a sneaked out night at the club.

Such is the unfinished game of scrabble, when the vowels are too many on your plate, the words are there but not lucrative, you pass the turn, you make the inconspicuous word “on”; but stay yare to find the next best meaning, look up a dictionary; and in the end move on. A move to kick back on the winter blues, a move to keep the group engaged, a move to the next little step of life… all in a cold laid back evening hour.