Loose Leaf Notes

The following was published in The Floyd Press on March 27, 2008.

Those monthly Scrabble games I’ve been playing with friends at the Café Del Sol have paid off. I was one of three players from our informal group representing Floyd in a Scrabble Tournament to benefit the Literacy Volunteers of Roanoke this past Thursday. With a score of 458, Virginia Nathan, a literacy volunteer; Chelsea Adams, a Radford University writing teacher; and I played as a team and earned a first place prize for one of the two games played.

More than one-hundred players filled Fitzpatrick Hall in the Jefferson Center for the 3rd annual competition, hosted by the Literacy Volunteers of Roanoke Valley and the Roanoke Library Foundation. The games were played in two teams of three with two rounds lasting forty minutes each, just enough time to use all the letter tiles if we adhered to the three minute time limit for each play. For a $30 entry fee, the fundraising event included two games, a light supper, and desserts. A member of the Literacy Volunteers made introductions and announced the game rules from the podium stage. Shanna Flowers (pictured to the right above), a Roanoke Times columnist, was our gracious master of ceremonies.

The pre-game atmosphere was festive, but once the games commenced the pressure was on and everything but the task at hand faded into the background. Immersed in our team huddles, we were playing against the whole room for the best score. At our Floyd café games an occasional play might take as long as ten minutes. In this case we had only three minutes, but, working as a team, we had three brains between us. Virginia, the calmest of our group, sat in the middle, adjusting the tiles while listening to input from Chelsea and me. Chelsea kept score and I drew the letters from the drawstring bag, which I had to do quickly. During the first game my hands shook as I placed the seven tile letters on our rack and tried not to drop them. By the second game, we were all more confident in our abilities and teamwork.

In between games, we socialized with other word lovers. There was a strong showing of employees from the Roanoke Times, one of the tournament sponsors. All of the six players on the teams we competed with were from the Times. George Kegley, a retired business editor for the Roanoke Times, was the evening’s official Scrabble judge.

Some teams boosted their team spirit by wearing matching clothes. One group of three women stood out, with feathered boas around their necks and large floppy hats with letter cards attached to them on their heads. T-shirts with words and Scrabble logos were worn by some players and volunteers.

Dictionary look-ups were allowed but cost an additional $3 donation. Every table was equipped with a Scrabble board, a timer, and three colored flags. With a wave of a yellow flag a volunteer would appear to assist with a dictionary look-up. A red flag brought the Scrabble judge to determine if a “challenged” word was acceptable or not. A green flag could be waved if players needed rules clarified.

I learned from my teammates that JENNIES are female mules. It was a word that could have scored us a Scrabble Bingo worth 50 bonus points if we had found a place on the board to play it. LATHER, JAILED, QAT, ZEES, TOKEN, and RODEOS were some of the words our team put down. We were able to make as many as three words in one play when we played a word that attached to existing ones on the board, expanding on them.

Our prize for the best score of the second round was a $50 gift certificate from Barnes and Noble for each of us. Prizes for the lowest team score of each game were copies of the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. A prize for the most interesting word, HALOGEN, was a round of golf for four at Westlake Golf and Country Club in Smith Mountain Lake. The best team name also won a golf package. Some of the team names this year were Victorious Secrets, Word Warriors, The Tilettes, and "Surely, This Name Will Win the Name Contest.” The award went to the Chixtionaries.

At the close of the evening, Virginia, Chelsea, and I (aka Two C’s and a V) struck up a conversation with a fellow player about the 2008 National Scrabble Association’s Tournament, which is being held this summer in Orlando. I don’t know if any of us will ever make it to National Tournament, but I’m pretty sure we’ll all be back in Roanoke next year for the Literacy Volunteer’s 4th annual tournament. In the meantime, maybe we’ll purchase some books about Scrabble with our Barnes and Noble’s gift certificates that will help us improve our game.

Post Notes: More information about the Literacy Volunteers of Roanoke can be found at www.lvarv.org/. Literacy Volunteers of the New River Valley’s webpage is www.lvnrv.org. The first photo is of, left to right, Colleen, Chelsea, Virginia, and Shanna Flowers. Read "Bag Ladies Ready for Tournament" HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

AKA: Play One for St. Patrick

It was Mara (center) who typed out our mission, described in thirteen parts and titled “Procedure for Scrabble Poem.” Part 1: Play a game of Scrabble with Colleen, Rosemary, and Kathleen on St. Patrick’s Day at the Café Del Sol. Wear Green. Joke about whether you are Irish or Scotch-Irish. Drink green tea. Convince the baristas to play Celtic Music. After that we were instructed to keep a list of the words played and to later write a poem using them. Rosemary kept score, while Mara kept track of the words we played, writing them down with a pink ink pen.

When Kathleen arrived, we questioned her choice of green, a pale mint, but she redeemed herself when she proudly pointed out the family heirloom pinned to her vest. It was an antique political button that said “Donal J. O’Callaghan, Mayor of Cork” with a black and white photo of the mayor himself.

We like to talk about words. Kathleen offered an explanation on the roots of the word rigamarole. It derived from “ragman’s roll,” and referred to the chant the ragman would shout out as he drove his horse and buggy through town looking for rags to collect, she told us. I was speculating on how the word “boondoggle” came about. A boon that’s been dogged? While looking for “doogle” in the Scrabble dictionary, I found “dogdom,” which caused an uproar of laughter when I read the meaning out loud: the world of dogs.

It was a strange game of compromises and strangled words tightly grouped in the middle of the board. I was ahead when I turned to Kathleen and said, “Even if I win this game, I’m not proud of it.” Rosemary told a story of recently driving the wrong way on the highway for an hour before noticing she was going in the wrong direction. “I wasn’t feeling anxiety, which gave me anxiety,” she said. We got so busy talking that ten minutes passed before we realized that no on knew whose turn it was next. “At least we didn’t go on for an hour like Rosemary before noticing it,” I said. And for some reason everything seems funnier when we’re playing Scrabble, like those random letters I picked out of the bag that said DI SEX. It was hilarious at the time.

I call this one “phase two in which Doris gets her oats,” which translates to this: Game two in which Rosemary wins.

Post notes: The Procedure Scrabble Poems have begun to pour in. Some have been left on my answering machine. Update: Mara's, Rosemary's and mine can be read in the comment section of this post!

Posted by Colleen at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

“I’m like a bridge lady who plays Scrabble,” I said to my friend Art, who asked me how I was doing as he was sitting down for lunch at a table next to ours.

We were at the Café Del Sol and three of us were playing. Virginia and I were getting in some practice for the third annual Scrabble for Literacy Tournament we signed up for later in the month. Rosemary, who had a little valuable free time that she was happy to spend on our game, thought I had said, “I’m like a bag lady who plays Scrabble.”

“Well, all of us are like bag ladies,” I said holding on to the Scrabble bag of letters and shaking it for effect, “Scrabble bag ladies.”

And what a game it was! I scored a Scrabble Bingo (when you use all seven letters in one play and score a bonus 50 points above the points that the word scores) with the word AVENGED on my first play. It was the first play of the game, which could have psyched the others down, but rather had the effect of making them play better. Virginia’s Bingo word was GRAINERY and Rosemary’s was QUARTERS. I got the X, Virginia got the Z, and Rosemary got the Q. The letters were well distributed; everyone played well, but only one of us won, Rosemary, coming in from behind at the last minute.

Post notes: More information about the Third Annual Scrabble for Literacy Tournament is HERE. For more Scrabble antics click HERE and scroll down.

Posted by Colleen at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Your thoughts and words are powerful … they think we're disposable … well both my thumbs opposable …are spelled out on a double word and triple letter score … ~ Kimya Dawson

Warming up for a game with my poet friend, Mara, I put the Scrabble box by the woodstove after it sat in the back seat of the car overnight. “I hope you’re dressed warm,” I said to her, holding the phone in one hand and pushing a log in the woodstove with the other. She assured me she had long johns on and that she would bring a paper from The Harvest Moon because my article on musician Bernie Coveney was in it and I hadn’t seen it yet.

Before we started the game, she downloaded Microsoft publisher on my computer so I could make my own chapbooks of poetry. I read her my poem about Jesus in answer to the one she read at the last Spoken Word night. My Jesus paints graffiti. Hers is an Aries. We drank tea with jasmine and listened to the music of Kimya Dawson, who features prominently on the movie soundtrack Juno.

Mara buys valentine conversation hearts like she was playing the lottery, looking for that winner that says, “Write Me.” One like it was given to her by another poet at the start of their friendship. They started writing each other after that, and Mara’s been trying to find another “Write Me” valentine heart ever since.

“At four boxes for $1, I can afford the habit,” she told me. We dumped them out in a bowl. Neither of us would eat them; we just like to read them. Later I learned that the theme for this year’s hearts is weather, with messages like Could Nine, Chill Out, In a Fog, and Melt Me. “Write Me” came from the 2003 line.

I fed her homemade soup, crackers with melted Swiss cheese. She brought me my first valentine. I think it was Sponge Bob Square Pants, but he was shaped like a heart. The message on it said “You’re the Spongiest.” She put it on the table before heading home. I was upstairs on the computer at the time, playing with a conversation heart generator. “I can’t spell WRITE ME, “I called down to her. “Too many letters … will BITE ME do?

Our game? Considering that I got the Q, X, J, and a 50 point Bingo and only won by 16 points, I think she played the better game.

Posted by Colleen at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

To the tune of “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire,” I ask Mara, “Why did you get your haircut?”

“I won a haircut.”

“In a poetry slam?”

“No, I said I WANT a haircut. I won dogs tags in a poetry slam.”

Mara’s daughter Kyla, sitting at the next table fixing her doll’s hair, asks, “Mom, did you take your turn?” But I hear ‘did you take a Xanax?’

“Why is Xanax spelled with an X and not a Z like Xerox, which should also be spelled with a Z?” I ask. Mara denies ever taking Xanax.

By this time “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” was playing on the Café Del Sol stereo from the fake Christmas song CD that Katy Reany made for Mara. The words are changed to “We Wish You Didn’t Live with Us,” but I hear “We Wish You a Merry Whip Ass.”

It wasn’t just the lyrics of old favorite Christmas songs that were skewered. The game took a strange turn when I innocently played NASH without a G and it was only noticed a few turns later, too late to take it back. We decided that everyone could play one free fake word with the stipulation that we had to provide a convincing fake meaning for it.

So NASH, played next to JO which is an Australian boyfriend, became an English boyfriend. (I was thinking of Joni Mitchell’s one time boyfriend, Graham Nash.) NOOKY with a Y was played and RAINOIT was later changed to CRAINOIT to reach the triple letter score.

A wire of silver stars from the container of Christmas cookies Mara brought got made into a tiara and was passed around for wearing on the head.

Max asks his sister, Emma, something like “When is a door not a door?” and she answers, “When it’s a jar.”

“Hey, what’s that word that comes before Caboodle?” someone else (I confess) wants to know. Mara recites her poem "I Will Be Devastated When They Quit Making Star Wars Stamps" while holding up a sheet of them that Max and his family gifted her with. She uses a Darth Vader stamp to pay her mortgage bill she says. Luke Skywalker and Yoda are for letters to people she likes.

Post Notes: I specifically lined Mara’s pose up in the second photo so that she would look like a red antennaed Martian. See a short video clip of some more Bizzaro Scrabble antics HERE. Click and scroll down HERE for more Scrabble photos.

Posted by Colleen at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

It was a mega game and a record turnout with six players, two boards, two dictionaries, lunch plates, tea cups, score pads and one decked out cappuccino spread out on the two tables put together to make one long one. We drew straws to see which of two teams we would play on. As the games began, mental struggling and concentration mixed with bursts of laughter and visitors coming by to chat. I kept looking across the long table at Rosemary who kept reaching into a large brown paper bag. For most of the game I thought she was eating popcorn and was hoping the bag would make its way down to my end of the table. Turned out their three person team was picking Scrabble letters from the makeshift bag. I played for a turn or two with 8 letters by mistake, and for awhile thought I had a blank until I discovered the letter A was on the other side.

Post note: This was last week's game. Another game is scheduled for today but may be canceled because of the snowy wet weather. Click HERE and scroll down for more Scrabble antics at the Cafe del Sol.

Posted by Colleen at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

AKA: Day at the Café

1. Read her lips

2. Game boys

3. It’s not rocket science or arm wrestling

4. And the winner is …

Post notes: All the above photos were taken at the Café Del Sol last week where Mara and I played Scrabble. To read more about how we dabble in scrabble, go HERE and scroll down.

Posted by Colleen at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

While I was swimming laps, Mara was taking her turn on the little Travel Scrabble game balanced on her lap. I came back dripping, grabbed for a towel with one hand and picked up a snapped shut tile of miniature letters with the other. Then I sat down on the lounge chair and laughed.

“I don’t even remember these letters. I must have picked them just before I jumped in.”

“Those are my letters!” Mara shouted.

A few minutes later, she asked, “Is sneed a word?”

“Only if we’re allowing Dr. Suess words,” I answered.

Kayla, Mara’s daughter, called me back over to the pool to take a video of her jumping off the diving board HERE. She didn’t make much of a splash. I considered doing a retake, but I had a game to finish.

Post Notes: This scene happened last week. More recently, I went to the pool on the last day it was open for the season, which was also the day before school started. The parking lot was like Walmart, which was unusual for our small town. I had to wait for a van to pull out, freeing up a place to park. You can scroll down HERE for more Scrabble adventures.

Posted by Colleen at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This is the summer Scrabble game when Mara and I filled up on wild wineberries and blackberries before we played. We passed Catalpa, Mimosa, Rose of Sharon, Butterfly bush, and all the flowers in Jayn’s garden on our way to the Zephyr pond, where we pulled out the wicker couch with the pink floral pattern from the sauna house for sitting on.

Mara thought she picked a piece of chocolate off her shirt from a brownie she was eating, but discovered when she put it in her mouth that it was really a piece of mud from when she was swimming with her daughter Kyla in the pond. It got quiet when Kyla went down to Jayn’s pottery studio. The breeze stirred. It slid under the trimmed edges of my blue silk blouse, and rustled the leafy green all around us.

Little plastic letters clicked into place on our Scrabble travel board. Words like fruity and fishy got played. The fish were biting. We could hear them splashing in and out of the water. Kayla came back and announced she made a pot. Mara admitted that Zacation wasn’t a real word. It was Zacaton she was thinking of. Some kind of Mexican grass.

Posted by Colleen at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

“The word ‘cicada,’ for example, stops me in my tracks. Sorry, I simply cannot continue.” ~ Billy Collins on choosing poems for a poetry anthology.

Colleen: If I put a blank on a double letter score and a blank is worth nothing, how many points is that?

Mara: Nothing

Colleen: But is it twice as much as nothing?

When Mara and I play Scrabble there’s a lot of laughter and flipping of notebooks as we write down lines we can’t believe we just said. You’d think we were pair of comics instead of poets.

Mara’s nine year old daughter and her friend are arguing. They can’t decide whether to jump on the trampoline, play with my doll house, play pool, or Yahtzee. Mara, who is trying to figure out what to do with an all-vowel rack of letters, stops to listen to them work it out. She looks serious but doesn’t stay that way for long.

“It’s meant to be funny,” she says before reading me the latest poem she’s been working on. It reminded me of something Billy Collins might have written and did make me laugh, especially when she spoke the words “cheap black umbrellas.”

“I just like the word umbrella, the way Billy Collins doesn’t like the word cicada,” I explained when she asked me why I laughed at that particular line.

I make Mara bubble and squeak and a venison burger for lunch. She brings me a pinch bowl that she made while visiting her aunt who’s a potter. There’s a matching small cup that says RED (for my last name) with a triple spiral like the one that’s framed in my bathroom and the one tattooed on her back.

“When I was a girl it was my chore to hang the family laundry. While doing it I would pretend that the only clothes I had left were the ones I was hanging because the rest were burned when the house caught on fire. What if the words on the board were the only ones we had left to communicate with?” I suggest.

After we decide that all filler words, words that aren’t nouns or verbs, could be used freely, we try it out.

I’m glad I’m not injured … Are you Coy? .. Are you coy daily?

“Hey, there’s a new word in the Scrabble dictionary: Zacation!” Mara announces.

“Does it mean you have to go to New Zealand or some place Dr. Seuss wrote about?” I answer.

After that and for the rest of the game, every time Mara says (shouts) the word “zacation,” she giggles.

Do you think there’s such a thing as Scrabble endorphins?” I ask her. “You know like a Scrabble high? I’m serious.”

But just like if we had smoked something while we played; everything seemed much funnier in the moment than it does to me today. I guess you just had to be there.

Posted by Colleen at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

“I was born in 1927; how old does that make me?” she asked.

“Wait, I need a pencil. I can’t do it in my head.”

“Neither can I,” she said with a laugh.

“You’re going to be 80!” I announced after abandoning the pencil and counting on my fingers. We both acted shocked.

The next time I visited my friend Ruth, I made sure to bring a cold Newcastle beer, knowing how much she likes beer and that I would be out of town for her birthday.

“This is my first birthday present,” she said, putting it in the fridge.

Although she lives on a farm with others nearby, she doesn’t get out much these days. And since her dear friend and roommate passed away last year, she really appreciates visits.

She’s been losing her short term memory, so we play Scrabble.

“I love a game that makes you think,” she says.

On the same day I brought her the beer and after we had settled down to playing, a goat the size of a small pony charged into the kitchen. I could see it coming from the window and all about jumped up on my chair. While I was acting helpless, Ruth shot into action, doing what I later called her “horse trick.”

With her 4 foot and some odd inches frame, she pushed the critter out of the house. Then she tied him to a fence post in the yard, scolding him as she wound the knot. In her younger days she ran a horse camp for kids. Some of the photographs on her walls are of students she taught to ride who still keep in touch.

Sharing a chicken pesto sandwich as we played, the game lasted over an hour. After sitting so long and straining our minds to find words, we were ready to let go and move. Dancing for Ruth is a meditation. From the first time I met her in 1987, I have wanted to be her dance disciple. Sometimes at community gatherings I would land myself next to her on the dance floor. But now it was just me and Ruth, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wood floor, transcendent music filling up the bright little farm house.

Her movements were calm, sweeping and focused, while I, on the other hand, worked up a sweat. After a half and hour of straight dancing we both felt lighter and like our minds had been swept clean. Scrabble and dancing are two of my favorite activities. Doing them with Ruth is an added bonus.

With a big hug goodbye I headed for my car. “I’ll be out of town for a couple of weeks. See you when I get back,” I shouted as she stood in her doorway and waved.

“Have a good trip!” she shouted back.

Posted by Colleen at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

When I first arrived at my birthday Scrabble game at the Café Del Sol, Mara was outside on the sidewalk talking on her cellphone to her boyfriend Arden.

“Say Happy Birthday to Colleen,” she said to Arden and then stuck the phone near my ear.

“If you put a G in front of your name, it would be GARDEN,” I found myself saying into the phone. Arden agreed to go by the name “Garden” just for the day, for my birthday.

“I feel so powerful!” I shouted out as I swung the café door open.

Inside, birthday gifts were spread out on the coffee table in between the Scrabble board, the dictionary, and cups of tea. They included a large heart shaped potato, a book on writing creative non-fiction, and an unsigned birthday card that I was told should continue to be passed on unsigned to the next person to have a birthday. There was a pink plastic musical candle that played “Happy Birthday.” I stuck it in my chicken salad sandwich and leaned in to listen.

“Is this how you get people to set their hair on fire?” I asked Mara.

“Blow it out,” she kept saying. I kept pretending I was trying to, complaining that it was a joke candle and wouldn’t go out.

“Blow harder,” she insisted. I was so busy feigning my efforts that I forgot to make a wish when it finally, accidentally went out.

We eventually got around to playing Scrabble, but because we got started playing counter-clockwise, we were continually confused about whose turn it was. When it wasn’t her turn, Mara, who organizes spoken word performances for Floyd Fest, made plans out-loud for the poet’s line up. She asked us questions and wrote things down in her notebook.

Kathleen had just gotten back in town and discovered that her broke-down lawnmower still wasn’t fixed and her tractor needed work. As she was lamenting about her machinery problems, I was replacing the words “lawnmower and “tractor” with “blog” in my mind and understanding exactly how she felt, having just gone through some technical difficulties of my own.

Earlier in the week when I ran into fellow blogger Doug at the Café, he told me that Virginia Living magazine had an article out about Floyd. Since I’ve lived in Floyd for the past twenty-one years there have been a number of stories written about Floyd. In every case the author has felt compelled to write about “hippies.”

“Did they use the word “hippie,” I asked Doug, hoping they had come up with an alternate more creative way to refer to Floyd’s colorful alter-natives?

“In the first sentence,” he joked.
Doug wasn’t kidding. The magazine was on the coffee table. It was a well written and informative article, but not only did “hippies” appear in the first sentence, they were described as gorgeous and floating, which caused us to erupt in giggles when I read it out loud and to take on “gorgeous floating hippies” as the buzz phrase of the day.

At one point, everyone in the café, even those I didn’t know, turned and sang Happy Birthday to me. My friend Melody, a booking agent for the Winter Sun, and a positively gorgeous floating hippie, poked her head in from the Winter Sun Hall door and finished the song with …. And many more... For a minute I wondered if the whole performance had been staged.

Posted by Colleen at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. ~ Dr Seuss

"Look, there’s a house turning the corner,” Kathleen announced. We all leaned towards the café window, some of us stood up to get a better look as a truck hauling a mobile-home made a wide turn from Rt. 8 onto 221 at Floyd’s one traffic light. At one point it looked like the white and black shuttered home was sitting smack dab in the middle of the street.

We were there to play Scrabble. It was Mara’s birthday. She wrote us all tankas and read a sestina in which the word cereal figured prominently. We collectively decided that “cereal” was not as poetic as the word “cherrios." Mara took notes, and so did I because I always do. I wrote down “Is that a double peace sign or a quote?” referring to a four fingered gesture that someone made.

I crooked my neck and tried to read Mara’s pants. They were light blue dungaree and covered with handwritten marker scrawl, reminding me of the collection of bumper stickers she has spread out all over her silver Forrester. Kathleen spelled out rhymes on her Scrabble tile while Rosemary schemed for the high score of the day. There was soup and tuna salad and steamy hot tea. Kathleen, a former Bostonian like me, knew what a bulkie roll was (a Boston version of a Kaiser roll).

We tried to get Sally, the café owner, to play but she was working the lunch hour. She did agree to be our designated Scrabble life-line and visited our table now and then to offer Scrabble consultation. We bantered with some of the Floyd Figures Art Group artists who were having lunch at a table nearby.

Somebody mentioned Kalamazoo. I think they were planning a trip there. “It sounds like a place in a Doctor Seuss book,” Mara said. “Or a musical instrument,” I added. We allowed Mara to play one free phony word, PERVE, because it was her birthday. The sun streamed in the large paneled window, Rosemary kept score to a Dar William’s soundtrack coming through the café speakers.

Rosemary gifted Mara with a miniature wooden dragon whose head wiggled and bobbed. Another dragon she had only shook his head back and forth, so he was replaced. “Naysayer,” Rosemary explained. This one repeatedly nodded in the affirmative, so we set him at the edge of the board for moral support.

There were no birthday cards, but when the game was over, Mara stood on a chair and asked everyone to sign her pants. Some people wrote slogans, others expressed birthday wishes. Curious café customers got pulled into the live art performance. “Take our picture,” Mara suggested to blogger David St. Lawrence who was sitting with his laptop at a nearby table. David deferred at first, noticing that I also had a camera in my hand, but Mara insisted, confessing that she wanted to be on David’s blog.

Post Notes: That's Sally in the first pant-signing photo and Kim from next door at the Winter Sun in the second. You can scroll down HERE for a photo of all of us at last year's Birthday Scrabble game. All Scrabble posts can be found HERE. Special thanks to David who, after the Scrabble Party broke up, gave me some blogging tech help. Jeanne from Out and Back has the interview questions I asked her posted today.

Posted by Colleen at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

There’s no rest for the wallflower Scrabble players at the Café Del Sol during lunchtime. Kathleen and I set up the board at a kitty-cornered table tucked behind a large fir plant. We hadn’t even picked our seven letters or found out who would go first when visitors began to come over to greet us; Dance Free Brit, guitar playing Bernie, a wave across the café to Ellen, Hello to Steve.

The crowd was a colorful one and the line at the counter kept getting bigger. Gretchen looked pretty in pink. David snapped a photo of me with his phone just as I was placing my tiles on a triple word score for my high score of the game. The din mixed with chatter, the music piped in, something in the kitchen fell and broke.

Kathleen’s soup got cold as she shuffled her letters. Her eyes darted back and forth from her rack to the board and back again. It was worth the trouble when she found a place to spell QUINCE. At one point I got up to roam around; to look at a picture of Stephanie’s little boy from the batch of photos she was downloading on her laptop, to find out how Talisin’s scrap booking class was going, to ask Jamie if he would teach me how to make posters as nice as the ones he makes for Winter Sun events.

JOIST, SALOON, WHARF, RILLET, and DRUID: Some interesting words, and some big scorers, but no bingos were played. The sun streamed in and the letters radiated out from the center, covering all four corners of the board.

Post Note: Scroll down HERE for more Scrabbling adventures.

Posted by Colleen at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

SOME DAYS FEEL LIKE THAT.

OTHERS FEEL LIKE THIS.

Photos: 1. Clean up after a game at my house with Mara yesterday. 2. Rosemary was counting out the letters that go with the Cafe Del Sol game last week. They often get dropped on the floor when kids play with them. For more Scrabble photos and adventures, go HERE.

What's your day like?

Posted by Colleen at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

It seems I go out these days just for an excuse to show off my new purple knit scarf, or to eat cookies. There were two Scrabble games going at once and half a dozen varieties of freshly baked cookies to eat at my friend Juniper’s house this past Saturday night. “I’m not even going to put my cookies out. They’re all the leftover Christmas cookies that I’m sick of, and they look stupid next to yours,” I told Mara, master poet baker and one of my regular Scrabble partners.

“Colleen has a cookie complex,” she announced loud enough for everyone to hear. By then I had moved on to the guacamole and the tomatoes stacked with fresh mozzarella and topped with basil and balsamic vinegar that Juniper’s daughter Autumn had made, because I’m just not the type to eat dessert first.

We complained about our Scrabble letter picks while Donna joked about mixing her background in social work and her love of pottery together by opening a shop called “The Crackpot.” Ginnie was giving Mara some informal career counseling to the sound of Jack Johnson playing on the stereo. Mara said something (unrepeatable here) to Juniper’s son Seth, having to do with our hard core dedication to playing Scrabble, which made me imagine all of us on motorcycles wearing black leather jackets with Scrabble letters printed on the back.

I couldn’t help but notice that there were rocks lying on top of wrapping paper under the white lighted tree. “Is it a step up from coal?” Donna asked after I pointed them out. Juniper wasn’t home from working at her Seeds of Light bead shop yet, and so Autumn explained. “The only thing mom wanted for Christmas was a load of gravel for the drive-way,” she began. Juniper’s boyfriend had given her a gift certificate for gravel, along with a sampling, and a Tonka truck with a battery powered dumper that Juniper later told us she had fun playing with on Christmas morning.

There was also something wrapped for me under the tree, but it wasn’t a Christmas present. Back in May Juniper was on her way to the airport when she called me on her cell phone to wish me a Happy Birthday. She was en route to San Francisco to visit her son. “I’ll bring you a present from the City of Love, something RED!” she promised.

It was a smiling red Buddha with a round outstretched belly. “He must have eaten more than his share of Mara’s cookies,” I said.

Photos: 1. Mara's cookies. 2. Scrabble at Juniper's. 3. Colleen wearing the purple scarf that Joe gave her for Christmas. Joe wearing the wool scarf that Colleen gave him.

Posted by Colleen at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Mara and I go to the Scrabble board the way others go to a bar. Scrabble takes our minds of our problems, but it also gives us the opportunity to talk about them. With letters clinking in the bag, we pour out our feelings as we play.

"I’ll tell you a joke," she said, seeing that I needed to be cheered up, “How many Zen monks does it take to change a light bulb?” I shook my head waiting for the punch line.

“A plumb tree in a garden.”

Bob (the bearded lady) came over to our table to say hello, but Mara and I all but ignored him.

“That didn’t cheer me up. It created more stress. I don’t get it,” I bluntly responded to her joke.

“You’re not supposed to; that’s the point. It’s Zen, Colleen,” she explained. (She told me another, in whispered tones, that did make me laugh, but I can’t print it here.)

“Hi Bob!” I called out, five minutes after he greeted us. He was across the room on the computer now, smiling as he waved. “I’m having a delayed reaction,” I explained to him, laughing.

“Well, that’s a good sign,” I turned back to Mara and said. “I think my sense of humor is starting to come back.” She was looking up a word in the Official Scrabble Dictionary when a scribbled note fell out. It was written in blue crayon on a ripped piece of napkin, addressed specifically to “Mara and Colleen.” “Delane and Amy say Hi,” it read. I smiled remembering that Delane, “Life in Mayberry” blogger from Mount Airy, told me he and his wife had recently been up to visit Floyd and that they checked out the Café Del Sol in person, curious after reading about it on my blog.

Jamie hasn’t been blogging lately. He came over to say hello. I complimented him on how great the Winter Sun web page that he’s been managing looks. His mother is a Scrabble player, in the top 100 in Australia, Mara and I learned. Our neck-and-neck scores suddenly seemed insignificant.

Jamie went back to work. While Mara and I played, we talked about the writer’s workshop we both went to the day before, our sensitivities, the definition of “creative non-fiction,” and the difference between a bulkie and a Kaiser roll. A cigarette break was taken; a couple of chicken salad sandwiches were eaten.

"Look, Colleen! This is for you,” Mara announced, pointing to a Roanoke Times spread on the café’s coffee table. It was a feature story on the role of pink in marketing products to women, and Mara knew of my recent interest in all things pink, especially pink blow-up rafts. She turned her feminist nose up at the thought of a bright pink cell phone, but I got a kick out of seeing the Roanoke Times in pink, especially when I picked it up and read this: “The new Samsung E530 pink mobile phone is a girl’s best friend,” a company press release said, “equipped with calorie counter, megapixel camera, shopping list … oh, and it even tells ladies when they’re ovulating.”

Zany had returned. Mara was telling Bernie the Zen joke (see photo above), but he wasn’t laughing either. Chris was telling me about a Roanoke Times commentary on the unreliability of electronic voting. It was written by a mutual friend.

Outside, after our game, and with a Roanoke Times of my own in hand, I gave Mara a big hug and thanked her for cheering me up.

“And it’s hard to feel bad when I win!” I joked to her as I walked across the street.

Posted by Colleen at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

1. X is a high scoring Scrabble letter. There’s only one in the bag.

2. For a brief time, I had the nickname Xerox. OnThe LoveLink, our family e-mail group, I sign my emails "xocolleen," and the spell checker kept changing it to "xerox."

3. It’s a poet’s job to say… the emperor wears no clothes … and …why can’t we let ourselves be so X-posed?

4. I thought I would feel more excited about the Democratic take-over of the House and the Senate. I am glad for the results, but the truth is that the damage is already done. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead. Over 2,000 U.S. soldiers are dead. The abuses and torture that happened at Abu Ghraib can’t be undone. I hope the shift in power will lead to holding the Bush administration accountable for invading Iraq under false pretenses and for mismanaging the course of the war.

5. Another member of our Writer’s workshop, Mccabe Coolidge, recently had an essay aired on WVTF radio. There’s nothing X rated about it. It’s mostly about pancakes. Listen HERE.

6. A new Scrabble score record! On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta's play of QUIXOTRY). ~ Stephen Fatsis, Slate Magazine.

7. I have a friend who is a folksinger. Years ago when she came into the bead shop I was working at, I asked her if she was working on any new songs. She told me she working on a new one titled, “Where has all the foreskin gone?” When I saw her years later and asked if she ever finished it, she didn’t even remember it.

8. I want THIS for Christmas. Link provided by Janet.

9. I don’t want X-ray vision. I just want to be able to read the fine print.

10. Lately, I’ve begun to need my reading glasses to see the faces of people I’m talking to. I know I’m at the point where I need a stronger strength of magnification, but I’m afraid if I do I’ll see how dirty my house really is.

11. Number 100 on my “100 Things About Me” says: I don’t like knick-knacks. I just see them as more things to dust.

12. At Floyd Fandango I ran into an old friend. She’s a former Hari Krishna devotee who makes a living as a puppeteer and currently sells sex toys the way other women sell Tupperware. When I heard she was going to be holding a party in my neighborhood, my interest was piqued, “I want to come!” I said. She rolled her eyes and answered, “Everyone wants to come, Colleen.”

13. “Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer.” Thomas Friedman

Thursday headquarters is here. My other 13's are here. View more 13 Thursday’s here.

Posted by Colleen at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (30)

Some people play Scrabble for a living. Not me. Although, I did just play two games in two days. I won one, and I lost one, but not as bad as Mara, who can be seen in the photo above with a big L for LOSER on her forehead.

Mara is forced to play blindfolded. Or, I snapped the camera quickly because I was trying to get the man in the background, who was wearing a shirt that said PAGAN on it, but he turned just as Mara’s girlfriend Leigh went to set the bag down and the camera caught it, seemingly in mid-air.

Woman in purple turns Leigh’s head. Should Mara be jealous?

Note: More SCRABBLE antics HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Now’s a good time to make that guacamole you were talking about,” (which really meant, this may take some time),” I said to my friend Alex, as I hunched over the Scrabble board and tried to concentrate.

When it was her turn to play, I got up and sliced one of the tomatoes that I brought from my garden. Every time I got up from the kitchen nook where we were playing, her cat took my seat, as if it was understood that it was hers after all, and I was only keeping it warm.

Because Alex’s husband works at home and also likes to play Scrabble, it was Alex’s 3rd game of the day. It was only my first, but by the time we finished I was worn out.

“It’s the ultimate irony,” I said to her.

Alex, who has more stamina than me, has cancer and was not expected to live past last Christmas. I’m healthy but have limited energy stores. I have to meter out my activities and rest in between each one.

We try to play a monthly game, but the last time we played was in late May. In June, Alex had a trip to Iceland planned to see the Icelandic ponies with her husband and sister-in-law. July came and went. I, for one, was busy with my son’s wedding and hosting company who were in town for it.

Sometime in August, I called Alex for a game. It took her two weeks to call me back.

“I was in Greece,” she told me.

“You’re kidding?!” Why was I surprised?

It’s becoming a regular part of our games; after we play, her husband sets up a slide show on his computer and I enjoy photos of their journeys around the world.

I was half kidding when I said, after watching the Greece one, “What’s next, Alex?” She proceeded to outline a 4 stop trip up north that ended with a wedding in western Massachusetts.

Like I said, it’s the ultimate irony.

Note: More Scrabble antics can be found HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

This is a photo of me at a Scrabble game yesterday, talking on the phone with my blogger friend, Naomi of “Here in the Hills.” I’m at the Café Del Sol in Floyd, Virginia, and she was calling from Los Angeles. Here’s the story:

Mara called to cancel our Scrabble game at the Café Del Sol because her daughter Kyla wasn’t feeling well. My date with my husband, Joe, for an afternoon swim in the pool was a wash-out because it was raining.

But all was not lost. I called my friend Virginia who had recently told me she likes to play Scrabble and suggested we play sometime. We pulled off a last minute game between her, her husband Don, and me.

After retrieving the board from the hiding place where Mara put it so that playing children wouldn’t mix up and lose the letters, we settled in to play. It was an enjoyable game, even though Don and Virginia are both better players than I am, and I tend to choke when I play with someone for the first time. I was also drawing bad letters.

Sipping on tea and chatting in between turns, we were near the end of the game – Don and I were neck-in-neck and Virginia was well in the lead – when Max, who works behind the café counter, walked over with the phone. “It’s for you, Colleen,” he said.

In a previous post, here at Loose Leaf, I wrote about my fellow Floyd blogger, Doug, making a joke about the Cafe' Del Sol’s phone number – 745- ACUP – which is displayed on a sign outside their building. “It’s a good phone number for a coffee shop, either that or lingerie shop,” he quipped.

With that entry, Naomi left a comment saying, “I’m going to call you at the Café next time you’re there playing Scrabble.” And she did!

“Naomi!” I blurted out, excitedly. I suspected it was her because I sent her an email before I left my house telling her I was off to play Scrabble.

“I’m here playing Scrabble and getting my butt kicked!” I told her.

“How can that be?” she asked. I guess I had given the impression on my blog that I was a pretty good player.

“I’m playing someone new and she’s whiz!” I answered. By this time I had walked into the Winter Sun Hall in the back of the building to get away from the noise of the crowded café.

After reading each other’s blogs regularly for about a year, I feel as if I know Naomi. She frequently features photos and stories about her life as a stage performer, playwright, singer, and artist. Because of the photos she’s posted, I could picture her in her house, see the exotic cactus plants on her deck, and imagine her cat sitting in her lap as we talked.

“Your voice is exactly how I thought you’d sound,” I told her. Naomi, who recently hosted an online party in celebration of her 75th birthday, has a warm and engaging personality that comes through her writing and was also apparent over the phone.

“The internet is amazing,” she said after sharing the story of a recent connection she just had with an old friend’s daughter, which came about by way of an old photo she had posted on her blog. I told her how my sister’s childhood boyfriend found her via my website, and how I found Terri from Island Writer whose wintering neighbors are from Floyd.

But soon, my mind wandered back to the Scrabble task at hand. I could see through the paneled glassed door leading into the Café that it was my turn. “I’ve got to get back to the game now, Naomi. Thank you so much for calling!”

Talking to Naomi was highlight in a rainy day that made my playing a bad game of Scrabble more bearable.

Posted by Colleen at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Mara says what she likes best about me
is how easy I am to please
Like when she showed me how to make
Celtic borders in Microsoft Word
I clapped my hands and cheered

And when she said -
while looking up a word
playing scrabble -
The dictionary always distracts me
I giggled and wrote it down

What I like best about Mara
is that she frequently says things
I want to write down

Like yesterday she offered this confession:
I want Sy Safransky (editor of The Sun Magazine)
to love me

Mara loves words
They beg for her attention
and for them we both dig deeper
In and out our hands descend
into the drawstring bag
as if the letters in it were nuggets of gold
and we could be rich if only we could spell
Rumplestilskin!

Some women play bridge
or poker with men
Mara and I play scrabble
to spin the world
stanza by stanza
a newborn creation each time

With a sleight of hand we coax letters
like Major Arcane from tarot
We lay them out to know our future
to surprise ourselves with their power

We talk while we play
about extra-sensory perceptions, colors of crayons,
her triple spiral tattoo, and tea

Her turn then mine
Question then answer
It’s easier to be gay or hetro-sexual
than it is to be bi-sexual
she muses

Because neither group fully claims you
I finish her thought
as the board opens up
with all possibilities on the table

She lets the dictionary distract her
while I excavate 10 points of Q
and try
to curb
my enthusiasm

How are you with paperwork?
she changes the subject

You mean writing poetry, I ask
holding my pen in the air
as if I was studying an atom on its tip
or bidding on a Salvor Dali painting

No, I mean balancing your check book
The atom falls off
Explodes a new word
She’s inventing Goddess names
for a new generation
And I
am writing
this down

I never balance my check book
I never know what Mara will say next

Post Notes: My Scrabble game with Mara got canceled today. This poem is my consolation post. For more Scrabble antics with Mara, my poetry and Scrabble buddy, and others I play with, you can scroll through my Scrabble Category Archive HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Mara accidentally dropped the dictionary in the middle of the Scrabble board 40 minutes into the game. It wasn’t the paperback Scrabble dictionary, but my bigger American Heritage one. Leigh joked that Mara should forfeit a turn for causing such a mess.

“Don’t eat those blueberries on the couch!” I shouted to one of the little girls who came over that morning with Mara and Leigh and was playing in my living room. “They make stains!” I cringed at the thought.

As we painstakingly recreated the Scrabble board, we overheard the girls (Mara’s daughter Kyla, her friend Skyler, and Leigh’s little sister Molly) talking to my husband, Joe. “Girls are smarter,” we heard Skyler say, “cause we do more stuff.”

“And we’re flexible at thinking,” Molly added.

We big girls, gathered around the kitchen table, weren't sure we were hearing right. “Why are girls smarter?” Mara shouted into the living room.

“Because there’s more girls in history,” Kyla weighed in.

Knowing there was a time when some women writers and artists used male pseudonyms to have their art taken seriously, and that women weren’t even allowed to vote until 1920, Mara whispered (so as not to burst Kyla’s bubble), “Well, it’s nice that she thinks that.”

Leigh was giving me a tour of her tattoos when Joe, on the way out the door, bid us farewell. Was he feeling overpowered by feminine energy, I couldn’t help but wonder?

Loudly, I protested as I picked 6 one point vowels and 1 consonant from the maroon drawstring bag through out the entire game . “But in a way,” looking at the bright side, “bad letters let you off the hook, because you’re not attached to them,” I said letting go of the possibility that I could win the game. About this time, Leigh was getting good letters and was feeling the pressure to use them well.

After the little girls got finished play-acting cats, ate snacks, and jumped on the trampoline, they played their own unique version of Scrabble on the porch picnic table. Apparently, their rules allowed from them to play with nine letters and the words they made didn’t have to touch each other. As a second generation of Scrabble players, they were serious about their play. Even so, the big girls did most of the clean up.

The games came to a close, and before they all headed out to Kyla’s Karate Class, Mara could be heard saying to me, “Hey, you’re not allowed to complain about your letters and win the game.

Posted by Colleen at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

It was Kathleen’s birthday. Mara brought cherries to share. We met at the Café Del Sol where there were 3 Scrabble boards to choose from and a few bags of mismatched letters, some of which had been purchased at yard sales for parts.

The last time we played together, it was Mara’s birthday, and we had to un-scramble all the various Scrabble tiles for a complete set of letters. We didn’t expect to have to do it again.

“I don’t think we’re the only ones who play Scrabble here,” I said, admiring Rosemary’s power of concentration as she sorted and counted the letters, looking like a wise woman at a cauldron creating a magic stew. Mara stood over her in an effort to be supportive.

“Maybe we should tape a sign to this bag, “DO NOT TOUCH,” Mara suggested.

“I don’t think the people who are mixing up the letters can read,” Rosemary added. In other words it was probably kids using the games as toys while their mothers were downing their lattes.

“Who wants to keep score?” Mara, who was looking at me, asked after the letters were sorted.

“Wants to?” I said sarcastically, knowing that my powers of concentration and math skills were questionable. “I will if you make me, but you’d be risking your Scrabble life in my hands,” I threatened.

Mara decided to keep score. Kathleen (on the left in the photo) drew an A (appropriate for her birthday status) and went first.

Even though I had overslept that morning and woke up feeling like my head was an overripe melon with seeds sloshing about, I managed to get my brain working enough to be in the lead for the whole first half of the game. But, just after making a particularly high score, I was stopped in my Scrabble tracks.

“My Catholic guilt must be kicking in for that last high score against you all,” I said, “because I just picked all one point vowels.”

“Do you think you can control what you pick?” Kathleen asked.

“I don’t know how it works, but, yes.” I answered while flashing my rack of pathetic letters to Rosemary in an effort to get some sympathy. Rosemary just laughed and called me 4 eyes (I’s).

From that point on, my letter picks only got worse, and I became an underachieving slacker with no plans for the future. I wandered around the café when it wasn’t my turn. “I like that music poster on the wall in the bathroom. “The not too proud to advertise in the bathroom tour,” I said, coming back to the table to take my turn.

“Hey, no saving spots on the board with the cherries!” someone shouted.

Kathleen, who struggled for the first part of the game and initially denied that the special birthday chair we suggested she sit in was lucky (remembering what happened to Mara when she sat in it for her birthday game) was now in the lead.

“After I acknowledged that the chair was unlucky, it lost its power over me,” she announced, and then she proceeded to win the game. Happy Birthday, Kathleen!

Post note: Check out that Za Zin Zany play!

Posted by Colleen at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Joe saw my car parked in front of the Café Del Sol and decided to take a break from his busy counselor workday to come in and say hello. Mara, Leah, and I were gathered around the Scrabble board in the cushy chair corner of the café.

After some friendly antics and Scrabble game theatrics, we all settled down. Mara, Leah, and I each had the intention of winning the game and so we leaned into the board to study it. It was soon after that when Mara gestured towards Joe, who was sitting on the couch behind me, and asked in a hushed voice, “Is Joe meditating or did he fall asleep?”

Joe’s voice rose through the hush like a whale sounding, and with one word, he surprised us by answering, “YES.”

Did that mean he was doing some of both? I guess his answer or the fact that he answered at all, floored Mara (see photo).

Post notes: I skipped the part where Joe stopped responding altogether and I put the purple poet beret on his head. I was thinking it would be “the picture of the day,” but when I went to take it, my camera battery was dead, something Joe had just warned me about the night before. Lucky for him I didn’t listen.

You saw it here first: My commentary originally titled “Worse than Watergate and Monika Lewinsky,” was published in the Roanoke Times today under the newly edited name “Country Agrees: Bush Steps Over the Limit.”

Posted by Colleen at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

My friend Alex called to set up one of our monthly Scrabble games. We were trying to pick a date in between her cancer treatment, medical tests, and a possible surgery.

“It has to be before the 20th because we’re going to Iceland,” she said.

What?! Why? I asked.

“My sister-in-law offered us a free trip. They have Icelandic ponies there that she wants to see,” Alex explained.

I’ve known Alex for the past 15 years, but we only started getting together regularly last fall, drawn by our mutual interest in playing Scrabble. When I think of her, I think of 2 things: her art and her love of horses. She’s a rugged individualist, one who does what she sets her mind to, like going back to school for her fine arts degree while raising her daughter and holding down a full-time job as a mail carrier - or, more recently, surpassing her doctor’s prognosis for how long she has left to live.

Because of her cancer, her doctors didn’t think she’d make it to Christmas last year. Not only did she live to see Christmas, she made the half hour drive to Floyd to play Scrabble with me at the Café Del Sol, and she brought me a Christmas present that she had made. Last month she recommended my book to her woman’s book club and then hosted me to attend one of their meetings.

When we finally agreed on a date and I made the trip out to the Shawsville countryside where she and her husband live, she seemed weaker than I had ever seen her.

“The treatments are cumulative,” she told me.

As we set up the board in the sunny alcove of her kitchen, she took a call from one of her doctors. More tests were being discussed when I heard her say, “I don’t have much time. I’m going out of the country on the next Friday.”

Alex’s state of health didn’t curb her ability to beat me. She’s better than me at Scrabble.

Do you have a down parka? I asked while giving her a hug before leaving.

“We won’t need one,” her husband, who had arrived at the end of our game, injected. Not only is it warm in Iceland now but there is continuous daylight there this time of year, he told me.

Alex’s illness puts life in perspective, as far as planning it goes. I just want her to be well enough to fulfill her plan to see Iceland. I can practically see her there already against the pristine landscape dotted with wild ponies.

Our next Scrabble game is planned for June. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Posted by Colleen at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Even though Mara can beat me at Scrabble about as often as I can beat her, I offered to let her win, seeing as it was her birthday