A couple of nights ago, some friends and I were talking about how much fun it is to play "Words with Friends" (a form of Scrabble) on our smart phones. One remarked that friends she hadn't seen in years had found her through Facebook. "I feel so much closer to them," she said. "I think about them whenever I play a word."
I might have thought that was a crazy thing to say, except that I'd said something similar only the week before. My sister and I have been playing, and I said to my husband one day, "It's weird, but I feel so much closer to her because of this game."
How is it that I can I feel closer to someone several states away, someone I'm competing with via random words placed on a digital screen? Maybe it's because I know her so well that I can imagine her complaining when I submit a word with a "Q" on a triple word score space, and I can imagine her giggling with glee when she sends me words made in two directions with a triple letter "Z." I can imagine her moaning and groaning when she draws all vowels and yelling at her husband in frustration when I win. And when she skunks me, I can imagine her grabbing her little dog Dixie, dancing around the kitchen, and chanting "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I beat your Aunt Cheri!!!!!"
Yes, we do indeed live in strange times.
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