I wrote the notes for the 17th in the courtyard among the alleys and slow streets of Village Pointe—an outdoor mall—in Omaha. Why? Because that upscale, outdoor shopping center (see also: J.Jill, White House Black Market, Harry & David, Ann Taylor, J. Crew, etc.) has a Mac store. And Mac stores have the Genius Bar, and I needed the Geniuses because my laptop started sending Morse code to me this morning.
Seriously.
If you try to start the machine when it’s ditching, it beeps the SOS to you. When you tell the Genius that your machine beeped this extraordinary sequence to you, they want to reproduce it, but they’re already looking to the back of house where the repair parts are stashed, as the friendly, dyed-blond woman who helped me did.
And, of course, I’ve had Abba in my head all day thanks to my machine.
Turns out that the RAM had gone sour. There’s a theme about spoilage that I’m unwilling to engage.
So what about games on the 17th?
I’m so glad you asked. It’s why I love you and look forward to your visits.
Dana and I were invited to Ladette Randolph and her husband Noel’s farewell party out in the local, rural recesses of Nebraska. We had engaged a high school babysitter who had to cancel on us, so we imposed on our neighbor, Kim, to put Wendy to bed as we set out into the hot night. After half an hour of highway driving, we dove onto a gravel road that took us through tall corn taut with well-developed ears, more grain than the world’s raccoons and deer could eat in a lifetime. So I’m happy to report that your supply of high fructose syrup is secure.
We knew about six people there—out of about forty—so we sat on the front porch on a metal table and chairs set and listened to meadowlarks, mourning doves, crickets, cicadas, and the scratching of bluestem and ash trees. Ladette and Noel care for twenty acres of fields, trees, outbuildings, and some very close xeriscaping.
We stayed about and hour and then took dirt roads back to town.
Kim said that Wendy went to bed easily, and we chatted for a short time. Kim gathered her water bottle and book and was about to leave when we asked if she’d like to stay for a game. Dana mentioned the project, and that was enough for Kim to feel that she wasn’t imposing on us if she joined us. So we cleared the table, spread out the felt, and I dug out one of the two print-and-play games that I’ve assembled: Dicke Damonen (photo from Bruno Faidutti's ideal game library). It’s a fairly abstract game about demons taking over parts of the world. It involves four colors of string, four matching colors of pawn, and a set of ghosts. It’s quick, it might well be fun, and we had a grand time trying it out.
Dana then wanted to move on to Carcassonne (photo by AngusBull), one of the very first games in our collection. My collection? It’s hard to keep the possessives straight. I cannot recommend the game highly enough, and I’ll move through the story quickly by noting that Kim won.
As I was siting in Omaha thinking about how I could conspire to sit so that the wind would help me keep my hair out of my eyes, I thought about how Dana and I would get a game in on Sunday, given our disrupted schedule. The project, I thought, was important and we needed to keep this thing going. I thought about ego, about my need to do this, but it occurred to me almost simultaneously that what I really needed to schedule was social time with my wife, that what this project had forced me to do was find ways to spend social time with Dana—and any other people who wanted to be a part of this. The change for me, though, is that focus, that purposeful setting aside of time to be with Dana, with family, with community. And that change seems good.
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