Triple Word Score

So at some point on Saturday evening I found myself standing at the counter at our house in Connecticut sorting tiny Travel Scrabble tiles into rows by letter. I actually had this thought: It is Saturday night, and I am standing at the kitchen counter sorting Scrabble tiles. I could never have predicted this moment in time.

The reason for the sorting, or at least the outward purpose, was that for some idiotic reason we apparently own (or owned, thanks to the missing "K") two Travel Scrabble games, both of which were out at kid level, leading Lily to come up with the clever notion of taking all of the letter tiles and combining them in one of the little pouches included in each game. This, of course, rendered both games unplayable, not that I have ever in my life been in a situation where I was one of a group of people in which this conversation suddenly broke out:

Hey! I feel like a game of Scrabble. Anyone in?

Me! I do! I want in! Can I play too? 

And so on, until there were too many people for ONE game alone, and I was able (or not able, as this exhilarating dialogue is hypothetical, remember?) to say:

Well, it's a damn good thing I have TWO sets right here then, isn't it?

But still. Even two people couldn't play Scrabble using the letters from two games combined, so I decided to do the onerous sorting, figuring I would learn in the process if--after five-plus years of children--the majority of the tiles had survived or been digested.

I use the word "onerous" (and, inexplicably, many sets of quotation marks), but the truth is, the work was actually square on the side of enjoyable. Much like folding laundry, cleaning the linen closet, sorting Scrabble tiles turns out to be one of those mindless repetitive tasks that provides enormous satisfaction in being absorbing and more importantly, finite. 

I think I have written here before about my love for finite tasks. I love finite tasks. Almost everything I do, personally, professional, parentally (?), is open-ended, never-ending, subject to interpretation. Not finite tasks. Finite: I even like the word. Onomatopoeia: Short, crisp long vowels, done. 

As I stood there sorting, my husband came into the room. I waited, knowing he would say one of two things when he saw what I was doing. He said the first: Why are you doing that?

I was ready.

Well, we don't have a movie, and I thought it looked like fun.

No, seriously. Why don't you just throw those all away and get a new game?

That was the second--I had the satisfaction of predicting both.

I know there are many people who would never take the half hour or so it took to sort the Scrabble tiles.  I am married to one of them, related by blood to another. But I am not a member of that tribe, and not just because I loathe throwing anything away, have difficulty, sometimes, buying new things.

In this world, in this family, somebody needs to be the person who sorts the tiles, who notices the bag of useless mingled letter squares, who dumps them out together, who steadies her jaw, and sorts. Who has the satisfaction, a better kind, of filling one bag with a complete set, putting away the game, out of child reach, this time, and storing the set with the missing "K" in the hopes that it might be found and the set moved on to the donation bag, so some other family somewhere can have the satisfaction of never playing Travel Scrabble either, at least while their kids are still too small.

Yes, somebody needs to sort the Scrabble tiles. Today, anyway, I am glad that this person is me.