Nora Ephron has shuffled off into the dark night, leaving us her rich legacy of essays, screenplays, movies and books.
Me and Nora had something in common: an addiction to online Scrabble. There was a dark dungeon time in my life when playing online Scrabble was the one thing that made sense. Yet addictions are addictions, no matter how benign they seem on the outside. When I should have been sleeping, I was playing Scrabble and insidiously a sleeping-disorder crept up on me which completely messed up my body-clock, biorhythms and ability to function while working four-to-midnite as a medical audio typist for a histopathology laboratory. They don't call those hours the 'graveyard shift' for nothing!
I used to play at Internet Scrabble Club. , the creation of Florin Gheorghe AKA Carol. I read somewhere that it was a project he developed whilst at school. I might have read that in the side-splittingly hilarious expose of Scrabble by Stefan Fatsis, Wordfreak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players.
I laughed until I cried reading Fatsis' memoir because I recognised myself : the obsession with wanting to play a certain word; the heartbreak when my opponent blocked the board; the attachment to a four-number rating as though it was the sum-total of my worth. The ecstasy and WTF! of playing DRUIDISM only to be accused of cheating. The petulance of bad-sportsmanship, the skidmark of the incompetent and unskilled. Scrabble gives you the full spectrum of competitive angst: without the sweat-stains.
I was never a player in the majors yet I could see that league from the level I did play at. I could give a major league scrabble player a run for their tiles simply through playing badly. Which means: closing down the board.
I grew up an only child so the opportunity to play games - any games - online 24/7 filled a need that went malnourished in my childhood. I was hungry for all games and learned how to play cards online, learned how to play backgammon online, learned how to play mahjong online. You see, online, there is always somebody who is happy to play with you whereas in real-life, most people are busy. Most people think sitting indoors playing games is no life: being a geek. I think those people are just allergic to good clean fun and are lousy at games which involve strategy, so they avoid playing those games and thus, their weakness is never exposed.
Scrabble is a wordsport that is mandatory for writers, ambrosia for lovers of words, and it increases your vocabulary. Addicts can rationalise anything. Science even validates it.
Word recognition behavior can be fine-tuned by experience and practice, according to a new study by Ian Hargreaves and colleagues from the University of Calgary in Canada. Their work shows, for the first time, that it is possible to develop visual word recognition ability in adulthood, beyond what researchers thought was achievable. Competitive Scrabble players provide the proof. [read full article at Science Daily]
Some years ago, maybe 2007, I went cold turkey with Scrabble and I do miss the challenge. I miss the warm fuzzy feeling I would get as I slipped into 'the zone of focus' and there was nothing else. Just me, the words, the board and my cat Thomas who used to sit on my knee trying to mesmerize me with feline charm:
purr...gotobed..purr...getsomesleep...purr...gotobed...purr...getsomesleep...purr...feedme..purr...
My dear little orange cat with the white blaze who went ahead to the Spirit in the Sky in 2009.
Nora Ephron; a name which always put me in mind of norephedrine (not a valid word in Scrabble).
Nor + ephedrine - a crystalline compound C6H5CHOHCH(CH3)NH2 known in three optically isomeric forms of which the levoratatory form occurs naturally with ephedrine; 1-phenyl-2-amino-1-propanol —called also phenylpropanolamine.
The previous word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is nor'easter a variant of northeaster - a strong northeast wind. A nor'easter is a storm with northeast winds.
In Freemasonry the compass point of the northeast is highly symbolic, for in the northern hemisphere, the north has been traditionally seen as the place of darkness. The east is known as the source of the light. Therefore the northeast corner stands midway between darkness and light.
From one Scrabble Master/Addict and Word Worshipper to another: fair winds, calm seas and blue skies, Nora Ephron. May you look back on your perceived failures and know them to have been mere tempests in a B-cup. May you never hear the phrase "I'll have what she's having" on the Other Side.
Thank you for sharing your secret to life: marry an Italian.
May the Q be with U!
Nora's 1996 Commencement Address to Wellesley Collegiates
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