World Championship Goat Cook-Off

Here’s another story about an activity Paul and I attended in September of 2001 while we were spending an academic year at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas.

One Saturday afternoon, we decided to sample some of the West Texas culture by attending the 28th World Championship Bar-B-Q Goat Cook-Off in Brady, Texas. Brady claims to be in the EXACT heart of Texas, a fact with which we took no issue. Two weeks earlier, on our way to our niece’s wedding in Austin, we passed through Brady, TX – about 75 miles SW of San Angelo – and saw large banners strung across the main street announcing this annual event. It was sponsored by an organization called the Cowboy Church. An article about the cook-off in the local San Angelo paper convinced us that this was, indeed, a “must attend” event.

Brady is a small ranching community of about 2000 people out in the Texas Outback. About 20,000 people show up to visit this contest every year. Unlike Sister Claudia’s hoity-toity Ugandan Royal Ascot goat races in Africa, in Brady there were no society tents and the fancy hats were optional – not mandatory. The only fancy hats we saw were of the ten-gallon variety and there were an uncountable number of those. I was determined to get one for Paul before we left Texas, even though I really had a hard time imagining Paul in a Stetson. However, after seeing him wear mostly shorts after we arrived in Texas, I supposed anything is possible. Many of you who know Paul well, know he has a penchant for long pants, flannel sheets, down comforters, and wool sweaters even in the summers – so wearing shorts has not been part of his usual wardrobe. But, he’d never lived in a West Texas summer before.

Beginning on Friday afternoon, 127 different goat-cooking teams showed up at the fairgrounds in Brady where they registered, were issued one live goat per team, x-number of pounds of wood, and assigned a camp space large enough to accommodate all their team members, kids, dogs, camping gear, and their “cooker”.

You might think you’ve seen bar-b-q grills before, but let me tell you truly, you’ve NEVER seen anything like one of these customized beauties that each team brought with them. They were custom-built on special trailers with large bins welded onto the back ends. Different kinds of woods were used depending on the flavors they wished to impart to the different kinds of animals they might be cooking. Mesquite, hickory and oak is typically used for beef and goats; apple wood, pecan, and hickory woods are used for pigs, etc. At the contest, however, each team was issued a fixed number of pounds of mesquite so everyone started off with the same ingredients and in the same amounts.

Each team was allowed to use their own secret recipes for basting sauces, seasonings, and bar-b-q sauces. The teams supposedly came from all over the world, but we only saw Texas teams, which gives you an idea of what Texans mean by the term “the world.” Each team’s camp was decorated to beat the band. Some teams consisted of large extended families, and some were just groups of people with other communal bonds of some nature. They all put up clever signs telling everyone who walked by who they were. For example, we saw the 30th Airborne Division team from the Dallas area who brought their cooker – the size and shape of a Minuteman missile, about 45 feet long and poised for launch with its nose in the air on a custom-built trailer. It had several lift-open doors down its side, each large enough to drop an entire goat into – whole.

So before we ate, we continued wandering around the grounds, gaping open-mouthed at all the unique bar-b-q cookers that people had constructed. Many were made from 55-gallon drums, miscellaneous war surplus-looking parts, aircraft fuselages, grain silos, etc. Each had about four-foot tall chimneys welded onto the tops of them to let the smoke out, except for the missile cooker, which cleverly vented its smoke out the nose cone. You could have cooked 20 goats in some of them! One man boasted that he could bar-b-q 200 briskets at the same time in his. Why would you need to do that? There were arts and crafts booths, food stalls, and little kids running around everywhere in ankle-deep mud. Yes, mud! When these Texans all prayed for rain the previous Sunday, they forgot to put some kind of time or amount limit in their prayers. It had rained all week and Friday night, the heavens again poured out another 3 inches of rain. The local creek rose turning the fairgrounds into a quagmire. There were walkways fashioned out of cardboard, wooden pallets, old boards, beer case cartons, etc. It didn’t seem to matter one whit to anyone around there, though, as everyone appeared to be having too much fun to care about all the mud.

One of the booths we looked at was called the “Cowboys Last Ride,” which sold handmade coffins. We had never seen a coffin booth at an arts & crafts fair before. We stopped to look. The coffins were all hand-carved out of beautiful woods – oak, walnut, native Texas pecan (my favorite), traditional pine, etc. They were lined with wool horse blankets instead of satin, and they were absolutely gorgeous. They ranged in price from $475 for the plain pine box to $1725.00 for the hand-carved Texas pecan. They offer to make one up custom using your own design if you like. Their wood-carver was a Cherokee Indian with a degree in Architectural Design. He also built custom furniture and cabinets.

We finally got in the food line at the pavilion about 1:30 in the afternoon, waiting for our big chance to try goat meat. We paid our $6.00 and were issued huge paper plates and we headed on down the buffet line. An apron-clad server heaped huge portions of goat onto our plates along with ranch beans, potato salad, and slices of white bread. White bread seems to be served with everything here in Texas, as are the ranch beans. They had long before run out of bar-b-q sauce. Another server asked us if we wanted Jalapenos (we did) and another person handed us each a cup of ice tea. Off we tottered to find a place to sit down.

The moment had arrived. Neither of us had ever eaten goat meat before, and we were excited and a little apprehensive about whether we would like it. We had been warned at another bar-b-q that goat meat was an “acquired taste” kind of food. We needn’t have worried. We hesitantly tasted the first bites of our meat, and then dug right in. It was delicious! It was similar to a cross between beef and mild lamb. I had expected it to taste like rangy old sheep – greasy and musky. It was neither. We agreed that its wonderful taste probably depended more on the age and quality of the animal that is started with as well as the manor in which it is cooked.

We ended our day by walking around the craft booths a little longer, and then we carefully picked our way back to the parking area, trying to not get any muddier than we already were. Besides the mud and the rains that had drenched that part of Texas, ever since the official ‘Pray for Rain Sunday,’ the large amount of water also caused us to be inundated by a huge plague of field crickets. These are the same black crickets that the Chinese keep in cages in their homes for good luck. However, this being Texas and all, these crickets are HUGE. They could have helped build the pyramids in Egypt! I’m sure these are the ones Moses called down on Pharaoh! And they were EVERYWHERE. Paul says the janitors swept them out of the halls daily by the bushel basket loads At Angelo State University where he was teaching. He was sent an email by the administration apologizing for the large numbers of them and their inability to control them. They chirped from behind his bookcases and swarmed under the chairs and tables in his classrooms. I didn’t mind them at all. I’ve always believed they did bring good luck, but Paul said that the only good luck that would come of them is when they were GONE. Anyway, not a store in San Angelo carried cricket cages, not even the local Pier 1 – because I had looked.

There were other events we had hoped to visit while serving in Texas – one was called the “Oatmeal Festival.” We’d never heard of an oatmeal festival and we were intrigued. Would you visit it in the early morning for breakfast? We surely hadn’t seen any oats growing around West Texas? We then thought maybe “Oatmeal” was a place, but we couldn’t find a place with that name on a Texas map. We never saw any more about it, so I suppose we’ll never know what we missed. And, of course, there was always the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up to look forward to the following spring. We had a lot of fun that year visiting events we’d never dreamed about.

World’s Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up

As some of you all (or ‘ya’ll’ as they say in Texas) know, Paul and I spent an academic year exploring Texas entertainment and culture while Paul was the 2001-2002 Guest Astronomy Professor at Angelo State University, in San Angelo, Texas. We figured it was unlikely we’d find this entertainment and culture available anyplace else we might ever live in the future. We were correct in assuming that, as a lot of the things we saw and did were once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

On a sunny Saturday in March of 2002, we drove over to Sweetwater, Texas for the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up, featuring Crotalus Atrox, commonly known as the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. This is an annual event that draws a crowd of 30,000 people to this small West Texas town. It started out many years ago when a group of area farmers and ranchers got together to try to figure out how to rid their properties of the large numbers of these poisonous, hot-tempered pests. The snakes were killing livestock, cow hands, cow dogs, and cow kids. There are more Diamondbacks in West Texas than you can shake a snake stick at, and they are a serious problem. In fact, when Paul returned from his interview for the Astronomy position, the San Angelo newspaper he brought home with him had a front-page article about a local woman bitten by a six-foot rattlesnake. She had run outside to her truck one night, which was parked in her driveway in the middle of the city, to retrieve a bag of potato chips. She nearly died even with rapid medical intervention. People around the area also didn’t take kindly to PETA protestors defending and protecting these venomous snakes, and we didn’t see one PETA protestor at the round up.

Lest you think this three-day reptilian festival only included rattlesnakes, I’ll have you know there was a parade of antique cars and old pick-up trucks, a beauty pageant, a Gun, Knife & Coin Show, an Auto Round-Up and Swap Meet, an 850-booth flea market, a livestock showing, and a Saturday night “Rattlesnake Dance” featuring Cooder Graw and his well-known band, the Eyes of Texas. We were repeatedly reminded over the coliseum’s loudspeaker that “Cooder Graw is famous because he’s the guy in the Dodge Ram truck commercials.” Remember those? Remember seeing Cooder? Oh, well.

I apologize for my political incorrectness in referring to the ‘beauty pageant’ by a fifties moniker, because the official title of this event was the Miss Snake Charmer Scholarship Pageant. I did NOT make this up. We actually got to see Miss Snake Charmer up close, while she was standing in the “Research Pit” in her Western regalia with a rhinestone tiara in her teased hair, skittishly petting a huge snake being restrained by the neck by a huge cowboy. She wore a large white fake-snakeskin sash draped across her chest proclaiming her to be the Miss Snake Charmer Scholarship winner. She won the grand $1000 scholarship. Other members of the royal court in this “Fear Factor” beauty pageant won $500 scholarships. They were all strategically stationed around the coliseum amongst the cordoned-off snake pits, fulfilling their duties of promoting the round up by smiling charmingly at the visitors and watching where they stepped in the hissing and buzzing arena.

We timed our arrival in Sweetwater for lunch, as one of the features of the Round Up was the availability of fried rattlesnake meat lunches. We were determined to try it, as we figured we might never get another chance again. The previous fall, we tried the bar-b-q goat at the World’s Largest Goat Cook-Off and found it quite delicious. We would eat bar-b-q goat again sometime. We can’t say the same for rattlesnake.

First, we stood in line to get into the coliseum for quite a while where we paid our $6.00 entrance fee. We got our hands stamped with a large, greenish-blue coiled rattlesnake that looked like a bad tattoo done by a biker on crack. This would allow us to go to the other exhibits – flea markets, a Gun show (the word ‘gun’ is always capitalized in Texas), and still be able to get back into the coliseum where the main action was happening. I noticed while we were standing in line that there was a medical evacuation helicopter right next to the coliseum, presumably ready to whisk any unlucky snakebite victims to a regional medical center for a lifesaving anti-venom infusion.

We next went straight to the Jaycees food concession and stood in another line to get our rattlesnake lunches. For $4.00 each, we got four pieces of chicken-fried rattlesnake segments sitting on top of a bed of greasy french-fries in one of those rectangular paper trays. Presentation is everything. We made our way up to the concrete coliseum seats in the arena, to sit down and enjoy our rattlesnake lunch while overlooking the huge crowds milling around all the snake pits in the arena below us. I took a photo of our rattlesnake lunches in their paper trays before we started eating. Yum!

You might wonder what rattlesnake meat tastes like? It was hard to tell. There is almost no meat on a piece of rattlesnake. It is mostly all bones, kind of like a Northern Pike. We nibbled all around the edges of the multitudinous rib bones and found a tiny strip of meat down the spine about the size of a #2 pencil eraser. It was quite chewy and rubbery. I thought it tasted like frog legs, Paul thought it tasted like chicken, but my Texas cousin Larry says it “just plain tastes like rattlesnake.” Out of the four pieces of snake we were served, we probably didn’t get more than two teaspoons of meat. This left only the limp, greasy french-fries, now cold and congealed, which look even less appealing than the fried snake. I decided to throw away my fries and look for something else at some other food booth. After the snake meat, a corn dog was actually sounding better and better. We could have gone to the outdoor area that advertised bar-b-qued rattlesnake, but I had rapidly lost my enthusiasm for eating anything made out of snakes.

Having finished eating, we were ready to go down to the main area and see the sights. The entire coliseum was filled with the noise of the enthusiastic crowd and the buzz of the angry rattlesnake’s tails. It sounded like a whole building full of over-stimulated cicadas, or maybe an angry nest of tracker jackers from the movie, Hunger Games. There were, quite literally, THOUSANDS of rattlesnakes of all sizes in the various pits. We went over to watch the “snake milking” pit where two cowboys with nerves of steel, were walking around scooping up rattlesnakes off the floor with their hooked snake sticks. They held the snakes up by the backs of their necks, forcing them to open their large fang-y mouths. The cowboys would then put their fangs down the side of a big funnel and squeeze their necks, and the venom would run down into a chemistry lab beaker. After the venom was squeezed out, they’d walk around the outside edges of the pit walls so people could touch the snakes to see what a rattlesnake felt like. The cowboys held the snake’s heads tightly so these infuriated snakes couldn’t bite anyone.

I looked over to see Grandpa Paul squeezing a large snake and encouraging me to touch it. (Oh, please! Where have I heard that before?) He said it felt “interesting.” Not to be outdone by my Honey, I reached out and wrapped five around one of the snakes as it passed by me and found it to be very cold, muscular and bony. I almost cried out Hallelujah! – like a Southern Baptist at a prayer meeting. I then immediately headed for a restroom and washed my hands thoroughly with soap and water. I will wash my hands again right now just thinking about it. Paul did the same (except for the hallelujah part) but his tattoo washed off and he had to go back to the front entrance and get another one. Mine was still visible two days after we got back to San Angelo, causing me much embarrassment. It must be a difference in our body chemistry.

According to the snake-milking cowboy in the viper pit, 40% of all anti-venom used in the world is made from the venom gathered at this round-up in Sweetwater, Texas. They had two giant yellow plastic trashcans in the pit. One said “OUT” on it and another said “IN” on it, written in black marker. After they “milked” a snake of its venom and let people handle it, they dropped it in the “OUT” can. Another cowboy would then fish several more snakes out of the “IN” trash can, using a long metal snake handling stick, and place them on the pit floor with their writhing kin. There had to be, literally, and I’m not exaggerating here, hundreds of snakes all over the floor. They were coiled up and rattling their little tails furiously, and slithering around all over each other. They’d hiss and attempt to strike out at the cowboys who seemed casually disinterested – not threatened in the least by this show of snake histrionics. I thought their job looked only slightly less dangerous than that of an active volcano lava sampler.

I asked one of them how come they didn’t get bitten, and he said the snakes were too confused to know what to sink their fangs into. He said that snakes find prey by sensing vibrations and heat using special glands on their faces, and that there was so much vibration going on in that place, and so much heat from all the people, that the snakes were too confused to know where to strike. He also said that snakes could tell by the amount of vibration and heat how big something was, and the snakes won’t strike something huge like a Texas cowboy. Really??? “Then how come this year’s show is dedicated to the memory of two guys who got killed by rattlesnakes at last year’s show?” I didn’t get an answer to this question, which reinforced my prior opinion that these guys were indeed, crazy or in serious denial.

I had earlier wanted to go on the guided snake hunt because I was very curious to see where in Texas that they found so many rattlesnakes. I wanted to be sure to strenuously avoid those kinds of places in any of our future outdoor visits around the area, totally forgetting that I might find one right in my own driveway in town. When we checked into this further, there was a list of equipment that each person HAD to have in order to be allowed to go on the hunt. This list included a hand mirror on a stick, high top boots, a snake bite kit, 4-foot long snake hooks or tongs, and a plastic drywall pail with a tight-fitting lid to put your snakes in. Yikes!! I didn’t want to CATCH any snakes! I just wanted to go along to see where they found them! What were we going to do with a drywall pail full of live rattlesnakes, for heaven’s snakes? Besides, all that equipment wasn’t something we carry with us on a routine basis. It turns out we could have bought all these things at the booths on the coliseum floor, but by the time we figured that out, the hunt activity was over. As the tour guy said to me, “Lady, this isn’t a Discovery Channel nature walk.”

The souvenir booths scattered amongst the snake pits were a whole other scene. They had souvenirs of all descriptions, all made out of various parts of a snake’s anatomy. Rattlesnakes come in various shades of beige. As it turns out, beige is the color of all the ambient light in the universe if it were mixed together. I remember that fact from college Physics. So, rattlesnakes blend right in with the entire universe which makes them doubly dangerous! I saw a walking cane made out of a whole rattlesnake with the head curved around to make a frightening handle. The fangs had been removed, of course, for obvious reasons. The bottom end of it was coated with rubberized tool dip which you can buy in a can at Home Depot. I thought it might have been a useful conversation starter, if nothing else, and if I mistakenly left it somewhere, it would cause quite a stir.

I did buy a rattlesnake skin hair barrette for $1.00, and with a great deal of restraint, I passed up the coin purse made out of a whole cane toad, with its zippered mouth and dangling little arms and legs with clawed hands and feet. I could see myself gleefully pulling out that Texas designer coin purse to pay for something at Trader Joe’s, at the risk of getting burned alive for being a witch. I kept thinking it would also make a most unusual gift for someone special, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of whom?

Other booths sold rattlesnake bones, various skin-embellished knick-knacks, rattle tail key chains, etc. – perfect trinkets for a would-be Shaman. There were lots of stuffed rattlesnakes, curled up and poised to strike. You could get them with fangs exposed or without. Our grandsons would have loved this stuff! One booth had stuffed armadillos wearing cowboy hats and twirling lariats. If having King Tut exhibit souvenirs around your house defined ‘trailer chic’ in the 70s, just imagine the statement a stuffed armadillo in a cowboy hat on your coffee table would make! This was not a flea market Christopher Lowell would have sent you to.

By then I was feeling a little “off my feed” and way short on carbohydrates after throwing away my gourmet lunch. Not counting the two molecules of rattlesnake meat, I had eaten nothing since breakfast. There were foot-long corn dogs available, which looked nearly as unappetizing as the snake, at this point. I was not in the mood for anything long, tubular, and fried. I bought a plastic cup of fresh lemonade.

We wandered back to the research pit to find out what kind of “research” was actually being done. It was staffed by more cowboy Druids who were weighing, measuring, and sexing the tons of snakes that were being brought into the coliseum, before they were sent on to the Milking Pit, and the Safe Handling Demonstration Pit. The Texas Dept. of Parks and Wildlife and Texas A & M University people were doing the research. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they were telling the sexes of the snakes apart? I didn’t see any good way to ask without embarrassing myself, or Paul.

There was another pit that was butchering and skinning snakes and selling meat. You could buy fresh rattlesnake meat for $25.00 a pound. You could also buy fresh rattlesnake skins. I noticed that the fresh, rolled up skins, which had just been stripped off of the headless rattlesnakes, still had their tails defiantly rattling away. Beyond gross! There were drywall paste buckets containing hundreds of chopped-off snake heads, still spitting and snapping after death. I thought that it would be pure poetic justice to get bitten by a disembodied snake head, with its tail triumphantly rattling away on its rolled up skin on a table a few feet away. The whole arena reeked of angry snake breath, reptilian blood, and swamps. I then noticed that the concession stand was using some of this meat for their rattlesnake lunches. I found this utterly nauseating, so we headed for the door to leave this creepy, heathen festival.

On our way out of the coliseum we had to pass people carrying plastic bags of still-quivering snake meat purchased from the butcher table. Near the door we noticed there was a “leader board” posted for a contest to see who could bring in the most number of pounds of live snakes. We noted one man clearly was in the lead, with 605 pounds of live rattlers! Other guys posted similar totals close to his. It was hard to imagine just one person collecting an entire 1/2 of a ton of snakes over a three-day period of time in a relatively small area of Texas. I told Paul that I was ready to leave Texas, right then and there, and never return.

By the way, if you ever move to Sweetwater, Texas and join their Jaycees, be careful what community projects you volunteer for. Just saying…….

Storm Across the Desert

I can never think about storms in the desert without remembering the 70s John Denver song which starts, “There’s a storm across the valley, clouds are rollin’ in….” John’s storm is across a valley, but I always think of the word ‘desert’ instead of the word ‘valley.’ John’s storms are beautiful and melodious and mostly in the distance. Our storm was not.

Last Sunday afternoon about 5 pm, the atmosphere over Yuma’s Fortuna Foothills area issued a Fatwa against the residents. Huge bruise-colored clouds loomed up and raced across the Gila Mountains, blowing strongly from the east. Rain and wind slammed into our house with such force it shook the very ground it sits on. Water began rising on our patios and up our steps. It rushed down our long front street, rising and picking up speed, and flowed right onto our property and down our driveway. It looked like a river coming at us. We were thinking that anything this intense probably wouldn’t last long, and would soon blow over and move on to the west. Instead, it just seemed to intensify and lasted a full 2 hours – locally dumping 2 inches of rain each hour for 2 hours.

We looked out all our windows around the house wondering if our lattice-covered patios would withstand such a storm. One of our arbors blew over, but the lattice survived without any damage – a testament to the engineering design and building skills of husband, Paul. We watched debris and patio furniture blow down our street like toys. After the first hour, we lost our power. It felt like being in a hurricane. We had never seen anything like it in our 12 years in the desert.

After the worst of the storm passed about 7 pm, we waded through ankle-deep water out to our car and drove around to see what had happened in our neighborhood. We drove out to the main street leading into our neighborhood and saw emergency vehicles with flashing lights and power poles in the street.

This was a couple blocks from our place. It was clear we’d have no power back on for a while. We then drove over to the dry desert Fortuna Wash near us to the east. This is what we found.

This is a very DEEP wash. The road normally dips way down the goes back up the other side. The water raging past in the photo is about 10 feet deep! All manner of debris was rushing along – patio furniture, trees, branches, etc. We saw many trees down, and walls blown over, and signs and fences down. There was trash scattered everywhere. It was eerily quiet and the only thing with any sound was a giant communication tower a block from us that had an emergency generator running keeping communications possible.

Here is the same wash 2 days later after road crews had bull-dozed the accumulated sand and debris back off the road enough to get it reopened. The neighborhoods on the other side of this wash were completely cut off until the water went down and the road was finally cleared.

As we ventured father from our immediate area, we could see that there was no power anywhere in our desert community of Fortuna Foothills. Whole stretches of power poles feeding the main substation were blown down, some blown into the eastbound lanes of I-8, closing down the freeway. By the time we got back to our flooded property, we realized we had no water either. Ish. We opened a bottle of wine and ate peanut butter sandwiches by candlelight for dinner.

Early the next morning, I packed up both myself and Yuki, collecting her doggie travel bag with food and water and dog toys, and we went with Paul to his office at the college. Arizona Western College was open and running – a true oasis for us storm refugees. Yuki and I hung out there all day where there was air conditioning, running water, and we could eat out of the college cafeteria. Early in the day, I booked us a suite in the La Fuente Inn in Yuma for Monday night, as there was neither power nor water at the house. By late afternoon, all the hotels in town were full, as Fortuna Foothills had 19,000 displaced residents.

By Tuesday afternoon, we had power and water back on at the house. We packed up at the hotel and returned to our normal lives. I spent much of the afternoon cleaning up and throwing spoiled food out of the refrigerators and re-washing dishes in an interrupted dishwasher from when the power went out Sunday. I shoveled up dead birds around the yard that had blown out of our trees – some still in their nests – where they had taken shelter and crashed to the ground during the high winds.

We were amazed at how disruptive something like getting displaced by a storm is to a person’s life and psyche. It is easy to understand how awful it must be to have your entire house under 6 feet of flood waters down in New Orleans, and places like that. Or have it totally smashed and blown away in a tornado. We suffered little damage and some inconvenience, but some people lost their RVs and more.

Fortunately, these two RVs were for sale on a lot and no one was in them at the time. It would have been hard to survive in one of these.

This is someone’s storage shed that blew across Foothills Boulevard several blocks down from our neighborhood. It was impossible to tell where it came from, as nothing around there looked like it was missing a shed? A person would not have wanted to be out walking around during the storm and encountered this baby blowing along! We stayed hunkered down inside while the storm was going strong. One sad thing I noted is that all those political candidate’s signs littering the roadways, were still standing – a little battered – but holding up fine. Of all the things a person would wish to have completely blown away from the landscape, these remained unscathed, just like the politicians they advertise.

So as John Denver’s song proclaims “…Hey it’s good to be back home again….” I can wholeheartedly agree with those lyrics.

Words With Friends

I have been playing a game on Facebook called Words With Friends for the past few months. I usually “hide” all those Facebook games, as I quickly got tired of continuously reading posts, by everybody and their brother, every time their pig took a poop in Farmville. Then there were vegetable and gardening games and a host of others. I opted to hide all of them.

However, the Words With Friends game hooked the literary side of me. I love crossword puzzles, and I’ve done the Sunday New York Times Crosswords for more years than I care to mention. I even buy their giant compendiums of puzzles by the hundreds – the super hardest ones. I always have one close at hand for a long plane trip or anywhere else that I might have to wait around a long time – like doctor’s offices, car servicing establishments, or the DMV. I absolutely adore Will Shortz! So the Words With Friends game looked a lot like a crossword puzzle, and I’m pretty experienced at crosswords.

Not the same! It kind of looks like a crossword puzzle, but it is really Scrabble. How did I not realize that right off? I thought I would be pretty good at it after my stellar crossword puzzle experience, but I am not – absolutely, totally, NOT good at it, at all. In fact, I lose almost every game I play with people. I’ve played every day for months now and I’ve only won maybe three games. I started off playing just with my English Professor son, David. I figured that I would try out the game with just one person to see if it was something for me, or not. I was constantly getting nagged by the Facebook Cyborg to challenge other people to a game. Lists of my friends would scroll by, while the Cyborg urged me to challenge one of them to a game. Thank God I didn’t do that!

David won game after game. We’d start another – then another. Pretty soon, we had about eight different games going at once. I would play my turn, then click on the next board and play my turn there. It seems I got further and further behind Mr. David – sometimes by several hundred points! Ugh. I would need to come up with many fortuitous letter placements of double letter, double word – TRIPLE letter, TRIPLE word words, in order to just stay close to his score. Example: David Wright 430 points, Joan Koblas 203 points. Whaaaaaaa. How embarrassing!

Churchill’s famous words rang in my ears: “Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” I suppose I must have blocked out that last part about the “overwhelming might of the enemy.” So, the masochist in me pushes the “Rematch” button and off we go again.

More friends’ names scroll by at a faster and faster rate, exhorting me to challenge one of them to a game. How much humiliating defeat can I stand? The Facebook Cyborg is now mocking me, I can tell, but I successfully refuse to punch his Tar Baby. This goes on for a couple of months. My literary ego is dragging in the dirt. I started a blog. I need to write about these things. Therapy? Maybe other people have had this experience, too?

I worry that one of those scrolling friends will suddenly call me out and challenge me to a game – High Noon in Hadleyville-style. Then what would I do? I can accept their challenge or cowardly refuse. I was so hoping that wouldn’t happen, then my worst fear came true. My daughter-in-law’s mother, Nicole, challenged me to a game. Oh no! I decided to get a grip and I accepted her challenge. Why is this so hard? I am a lawyer and a writer and a veteran crossword worker. Word games should come easy for me, right? The whole family will know what a ditz I really am, not just my son David, who has suspected it all along.

True to my previous record with this game, she beat me handily, and English was a second language to her Quebecois French! She immediately challenged me to a rematch. I foolishly accepted. I can’t possibly keep losing these games forever, can I? I am also having terrible luck with the letters I get given to me by the game Cyborg. Onetime I had five of the letter “i” at one time. My little tray looked like a typewriter threw up on it, spewing all its “i” letters on my side at once. Sometimes I end up with a tray full of nothing but consonants. Or I’ll try to play a word that I think is great, and the Cyborg will refuse to play it pronouncing it to be “an unacceptable word, misspelled, or a proper noun.” Curses!!! Then two turns down the road, it will allow the exact same word to be played by my opponent!! Unfair!! How can you protest to a computer???? Whine, whine, whine.

So my record probably stands as the worst in the Words With Friends annals. To soothe my wounded ego, I have decided to think of myself as a person who delights in making others feel good about themselves by playing with me. I get up in the morning and think to myself, “How can I make other people’s day go well? How can I help them feel good about themselves all day I know! I can accept their challenges to Words With Friends knowing they will win every time!” That will make them happy, and should make me happy, as well. Right? Maybe if I was from Minnesota, that is, but sadly, I’m not.

Here is a sample record of the last few days. Over this past 2 weeks, I have played hundreds of games with these two people and won maybe 3. They have earned their bragging rights.

Not only that, but I keep on accepting their challenges. I am trying to be more careful with my word placements, and I am trying to look down the line to see if a word I play on my turn will set my opponent up for huge gains with their next play. A lot like Chess! The game board has become a minefield of squares with potentially death-dealing point potential for my enemies, err – friends. Gone is the day when just coming up with a really good word from your tray of letters is enough. Exactly where you place your word becomes the operative skill. Sometimes you need to forgo playing a really good word to prevent setting up your opponent with a triple word score on their next move. Every now and then though, I get to play a word with triple letter squares and I hit the big triple word square with a word containing 10-point Qs or Zs, and I rack up a huge score. I once got 130 points for one word! I still lost. Ish.

I like my paper crosswords so much better. I only have to beat Will Shortz, and I get an automatic rematch every Sunday in the paper. I have all week to solve his puzzle if I need it, and he doesn’t keep changing the words around as I play. The print version crosswords also don’t have those annoying pop-up ads constantly cluttering up the screen.

So I will continue to play the Words With Friends game for a while longer by tamping down my competitive drive and just enjoying interacting with the people I know and love. I’ll have to save my competitive streak for my Kendo class which starts this Friday. I am sure I will have plenty to say in the future about THAT upcoming adventure/experience.