Saturday night in Boise

I had a great time in Boise last weekend. Poor Mom picked me up at the airport Friday night with a Band-Aid on her ear; seems earlier that day her hairdresser almost Van Goghed her. Mom said she bled all over the salon, but the good news is she got five bucks off her haircut, which (curiously) was what she left as a tip. So the tip of her ear paid for the hairdresser’s tip… yet another reason to marvel at the synchronicity of the universe. Yes, everything unfolds in divine order, though you may give up a chunk of flesh in the process. To her credit, Mom laughed it off and wondered how deep a discount an eye would have garnered.

Saturday night I did, in fact, kick Mom’s and Stepdaddy’s asses in Scrabble. Mom is a formidable opponent, but Stepdaddy gets points in technique. He stares into the tiles—without even blinking—and then in the time it would take me to write a short novel finally produces “que” (perfectly acceptable if we were playing in France or Quebec) or a pseudo-word like “glab.” This sets Mom off.

“GLAB?” she yells, despite the fact that Stepdaddy wears two hearing aids. “What the hell kind of word is glab?”

Stepdaddy shrugs, and instead of bothering to create a pseudo-definition, he immediately replaces the made-up word with something like “zoom,” positioning the 10-point Z tile on a triple letter space, which causes my mother to roll her eyes and murmur obscenities under her breath.

Almost losing an ear at the hairdresser’s—no problem. Stepdaddy’s tactical approach to Scrabble—problem.


Playing Scrabble on a Saturday night in Boise—priceless.