Some things get better with age. Wine, yes, though when I drank I didn’t give a damn about vintage. Cheese, beyond a certain point. Jeans. A pair of well-worn Levis trumps new ones every time.  Older trees produce higher quality fruit. Pearls grow more luminous the more they’re worn; the skin’s natural oils gently lubricate the delicate nacre. Leather. And probably sex, though this is complicated. Maturity brings bodily acceptance and emotional trust, not to mention expertise, but, ah, for the days of feral pleasure with some pretty, wild boy.

Vocabulary expands with age.  Or should, if we read anything at all. A few years back, a student asked the meaning of ambivalent.  Another student piped up: “Isn’t ambivalent something like ambiguous?” We spent the entire class coming up with examples, using ambiguous and ambivalent in sentences: “The professor felt ambivalent about giving the student a B, but the otherwise well-written paper had an ambiguous ending” and “The student felt ambivalent about the grade he was given because the teacher’s instructions were ambiguous.”

My vocabulary has increased over the years.  Definitely. (Or, as my students mistakenly write, defiantly.)  In addition to habitual reading and writing, I also study lists of words for Scrabble competitions, high probability combinations of seven and eight letters: nidates, oolites, arsenite, antrorse. I try to use these in conversation in goofy ways so that I remember them: “Excuse me, honey, can you pass me the arsenite?” and “Ooh, I like your new oolites!”

One of the problems with aging, however, is that at some point we begin to forget the words it’s taken a lifetime to acquire.

This happened to me over the weekend at the Dallas Open Scrabble tournament. I had ADELMRS on my rack. I knew there was something in that combination of letters because I know the mnemonic for ALDERS—FIRS THORNS PRICKLED TWO BUMS.  I sat there shuffling my tiles until my head hurt. I consoled myself that it was Game 18 out of 20 and that MEDLARS is not a common word. A medlar, according to Dictionary.com, is “a small tree, the fruit of which resembles a crab apple and is not edible until the early stages of decay.”

I felt very crabby at the moment and was probably in the early stages of a precipitous mental decay, but maybe I was still “edible.”

I didn’t have a great tournament, but it was nothing compared to what my husband experienced.  I lose at Scrabble all the time, but Marty, well, Marty does not.  He’s come in second at the Dallas Open twice. Last year he scored 702 points in a game, a feat that got him into the 700 Club for the third time. (Note: This 700 Club is not to be confused with Pat Robertson’s evangelic dog and pony show that explains phenomena such as Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for decadent life styles.)

Anything can happen in an open tournament. The highest rated Scrabblers play the lower seeds in the first three games. It’s kind of like March Madness. There can be upsets. There can be Scrabble Cinderellas.

For example, at the first New Orleans Open just two months ago Scott Hawkins beat Joel Sherman, winner of both the World Scrabble Championship and the National Scrabble Championship. Joel is known as G.I. Joel in Scrabble circles; the G.I. stands for gastrointestinal and refers to Sherman’s tendency to burp (and make other sounds) during games. Scott Hawkins sometimes burps, though it’s usually when he’s had too much beer. He’s a good-looking scalawag who sometimes plays at our club in Charleston. I once gave him valuable advice about dating women who didn’t have whiskey for breakfast, counsel he ignored for the most part.

Anyway, according to witnesses, Scott crawled into the hotel at six am, took a two hour nap, then got up, still hung-over, and gulped down some coffee before staggering over to the table where he was to play Sherman. Where he was to play and to beat Joel Sherman.  Of course, he picked great tiles. “I got everything,” Scott told me.

Nothing quite that dramatic happened to Marty. No intoxicated hussy got all the tiles. He lost his first three games.  He forgot some words. He didn’t see GELATING/LEGATING in his first match. He forgot that PAVIN, a variant of pavane, an old-fashioned dance, takes an –s front hook to form SPAVIN, a bone growth in the hooves of horses. (Spavin comes from the Old French espavain, which means swelling.) I knew that PAVIN takes an –s.  Marty taught me that years ago, and so I played it in Game Number 15, the last game of the second day. I won by hooking a seventy-six point bingo ending with an –s onto PAVIN.

The word that best describes my feelings about beating my husband at the Dallas Open is ambivalent.  I was elated at first, ready to jump out of my chair and do a series of fist pumps. Ninety five percent of the time when we play at home or at the club, Marty wins. Then I felt guilty, as if I had done something terribly wrong, had upset the natural order of the universe. Then I felt sad because Scrabble means so much more to Marty than it does to me and he was having a bad tournament. And then I was worried because Marty forgetting SPAVIN is so unlike him.

Perhaps he was tired. Our mattress at home is too soft for his hard, sports-ravaged body.  Perhaps he was worried about his father, who’s recently been diagnosed with cancer. Although the prognosis is good, doctors will have to remove a kidney.  Perhaps the fact that Marty is also playing international Scrabble, which uses another, bigger dictionary, threw him off his game.  There are 90,000 words in the North American dictionary; international Scrabble adds another 30,000.

I decided to treat Marty to dinner at the Crazy Buffet. We sat there and ate egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken and won ton soup and analyzed our games and then when the waitress brought the fortune cookies Marty broke open his and began to laugh.

His fortune read: “Perhaps you should take up another hobby.”

An insight gleaned from Daiva’s Month of Friendly Love—when you write about people, you begin to feel closer to them. You even begin to have imaginary conversations with them (at least I do.) I noticed this as well in writing about my husband in what I hope to be my next book—a memoir about love and Scrabble, tentatively called Love and Sextiles.  On the days I write about Marty, I am more patient and loving, ignoring things that would have irritated me in the past. Of course, there are people I don’t wish to feel closer to, which is why I don’t write about them.  These include friends who are two-faced, angry Lithuanians, Rick Santorum, and anyone from the cast of Jersey Shore.

Speaking of my husband, it’s his sixtieth birthday. Because he’s a Leap Year baby, he’s only fifteen.  He is the light of my life, the fire of my….oops, the wind beneath my wings, the moon beneath my sun, the water above my head, etc. etc.

I’m grateful for /to Rachel Panepinto, who gave me the idea of writing about someone you like during the month of February.  Rachel was a student of mine years ago when I was director of the Writing Center and she was a graduate assistant. She was the kind of student every teacher dreams of having: very smart, inquisitive, hard-working, and polite. Today she is one of our best teachers here at her own alma mater—Eastern Illinois University.

I was thinking today of people I’d choose to have with me during a crisis, not a small calamity, like I can’t find the car keys, but something big, like the country is under siege by Republicans. Or even something medium dramatic, like Charleston being invaded by mealy bugs. (I actually don’t know what mealy bugs are, but they sound like insects that would steal your dinner.)  I don’t know what made me think of crises. Maybe it was the incident that occurred last week at Charleston High School when someone called and said that someone else had brought a gun to school. It turns out there probably was no gun, but school officials were worried and shut down the school. (Or maybe it was reading about Santorum, who makes the pope look like a liberal, and whom I’ve started calling Sanitarium.)

At the top of my list would be Terri and Tim. They are two of the calmest, most logical and most hard working people I know. They’re not married to each other or otherwise related, but they do share similarities (other than being calm and hard working and logical.) Both have exceptionally smart and good-looking children who say and do funny things. Both have an admirable knowledge of sports, Terri of pro football and baseball, especially the Rams and the Cardinals (she’s from St. Louis), and Tim of college football, especially University of Alabama football (one of his alma maters), and baseball (he cheers for that other Chicago team.)  Both are funny. Not ha-ha funny—you’re not likely to hear them tell fart jokes or do Daffy Duck imitations—but dry, insightful, often sarcastic funny.

Terri and Tim would stay calm and focused. They would draw up plans, including Venn diagrams and detailed instructions, as to how to get out of the above-mentioned crises. They would provide necessary humor and perhaps even baked goods. We could all watch sports together.

Another person I’d want to have with me in a crisis is Bonnie.  Bonnie has been a friend and a mentor since I’ve been here at Eastern.  She is calm, logical, and hard working. She knows a thing or two about diplomacy and a lot about politics of all kinds. She and her husband host a monthly game night.  Compared to some other people who shall remain nameless, she is a good sport.  Although she is competitive, she doesn’t need to win. She doesn’t get into extended arguments about the rules. And she provides really good food: grape leaves, fancy cheese, chocolate.

Yes, this would be my emergency trinity. I’d have other people on board the crisis ark as well: my husband, for Scrabble and sex (honey, you are more than a Scrabble sex god, but I don’t have room or time to write about the other things); my writing group, so I wouldn’t be focused completely on the crisis (or could write about the dire predicament); the people I’ve mentioned previously in Daiva’s Month of Friendly Love (which include my husband and writing group.) I’d throw in the three people who read my blog.

It would be a pretty big and entertaining ship.

It is almost midnight and Marty is downstairs, playing Scrabble with Scott G.There’s another Scott who plays Scrabble and sometimes comes to our club— Scott H.,–but they are very different. Scott H. is debauched, while Scott G. is a responsible husband and father with a job.  He used to be a professor of classics at UIUC, but he hated the politics, among other things. His wife, Lori, got a job at Rhodes College—she’s a medievalist— so the family moved to Memphis.  Their son, Nate, is nine years old but reads at a college level.  Like Noel, whom I wrote about in a previous blog, he doesn’t like scary books.  He likes to be called Nate or Nathanael, but not Nathan.

Marty is always in a good mood when Scott drives up from Memphis to play Scrabble.  One reason is that Scott is an excellent player—his rating is over 1700—so he gives Marty serious competition, and there’s nothing Marty likes better than serious competition.  Also, Scott is what Marty calls “low maintenance,” which means he’ll eat at Subway and let Marty do most of the talking.  Marty mentored Scott up through the Scrabble ranks and sometimes refers to him as his protégé. He is very proud when Scott does well at a tournament.  Scott gives Marty his props, so everyone is happy (unless they play each other in the same division in a tournament.)

The house was filled with Scrabblers today. We celebrated Marty’s 60^th birthday, or, as he likes to tell people, his fifteenth birthday since he’s a Leap Year baby. To honor the event, we had a little tournament. I ordered a Scrabble cake, and there were prizes for best words played that describe Marty. Of course, Marty got to choose. I told a player to put down wud, which means crazy.  Marty didn’t think that was very funny.  Sterling was one of the words he chose. Usually the club ends at five, but this being a special occasion we played beyond that. Now everyone is gone, except for Scott, who is spending the night.

I don’t mind being by myself, listening to music, reading, knitting, writing in my blog, especially when I know my husband is happy. And I like Scott, although he regularly beats me at Scrabble.

Not all friendships are easy.  People are complicated.  Sometimes they’re crazy or overly needy or mean, and you realize that only later.  I have several corpses in the friendship graveyard, such as the ex-friend who was furious at me for taking the job here at Eastern.  I had finished my Ph.D and was job-less; I was thrilled to get work so close to home.  She, however, felt betrayed. She wasn’t a lover or a relative, mind you, just a good, if difficult, friend.

Sometimes, however, friendships can be resurrected.  I was in therapy this past year, dealing with the grief caused by the death of a good friend as well as my failed relationship with my only sister.  Therapy caused me to examine my relationships more closely. One of the insights gleaned from talking to my counselor was that we often dislike certain traits in other people because we share these very same traits. We might find annoying those people who feel the need to be good in everything because we ourselves feel the need to be good in everything. We might frown at the individual trying to capture the limelight because it’s what we ourselves feel compelled to do.  (Of course, we often dislike people who are very different from our BEST selves. I will probably never be close friends with a right-wing Republican.)

This past fall I examined a friendship with a woman with whom I’ve had some issues in the past. She can be bossy, like me. She likes attention, like me.  Perhaps one reason she likes attention is that somewhere in her past she didn’t get enough, or, more likely, of the right kind. I thought of all the things I like and admire about her. We have enough in common. We’re both smart and ambitious. We like to read. We like to knit. We’re both feminists.

I’ve decided to forgive her for being like me.

My parents called her Teresele, the Lithuanian diminutive of Teresa. There was nothing miniature about her, though. She was tall with long dark hair as thick and lush as a velvet cape. You could ski off her cheekbones.  You’ve heard of the phrase “kidnapped by gypsies”? Well, I always thought the reverse was true of Teresa; her parents had abducted her from the cigonai. She looked like no other Lithuanian I knew. She still looks exotic, though age has softened her features and her hair is flecked with gray.

I admired her from afar for many years, as she was ten years older, listened attentively as she read her poetry at literary evenings at the Lithuanian Youth Center. She was also a film-maker; she and her husband filmed the neo-Nazis as they marched in Marquette Park in the 1970s, capturing all that hate. They filmed the Pope as he waved genially to the South Side crowds from his Popemobile. They archived the Lithuanian past in a series of talks with individuals who remembered the Russian revolution of 1917, among them my grandfather.

It seems as if we’ve been friends forever, yet I don’t remember how we actually got to know one another. She was from Cicero, but had not gone to St. Anthony’s School. Perhaps she became friends first with my parents, both of whom loved literature and liked to encourage young talent.  My mother called Teresa her third daughter. Teresa would phone my mom, or come over, and they’d drink tea and talk about gardening or poetry. Teresa would sometimes tell my mom her problems. When my mom was sick with cancer, Teresa brought blueberry soup and dumplings and prayers.

She remains my strongest connection to the Lithuanian community in Chicago. It was from Teresa that I learned about the death of Arvid, a childhood friend and character in my memoir. We sometimes make fun of Lithuanians we know, she more gently than I.

I love her linguistic quirks. “Let’s go for some Thai food,” she’ll say, pronouncing Thai like thigh. “I’ve always wanted to visit Thighland,” she told me once. She pronounces chic like cheek: “That woman looks so cheek with that scarf.”

Teresa’s Lithuanian is way better than mine.

Teresa and I share a love of baroque music, long nature walks, comfort food, and vintage stores. She owns a lot of hats, old and new.  She looks great in hats. She can wear a beret like nobody’s business.

My friend and colleague Fern uses the word delightful a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her swear. She is an expert in children’s literature.  She married her high school sweetheart. She never wears pants to work—it’s jumpers or skirts and blouses, usually with pumps. Tasteful, diminutive jewelry.  Before you get the idea that she is some kind of a do-gooder Little House on the Prairie type, you should know that Fern’s original field of study was Hemingway, and who’s more bad-ass than Hemingway? Her skirts reveal her gorgeous legs. I suspect that hidden in her dresser at home is a collection of expensive French lingerie.

Fern’s office is a room away from mine.  It is painted a sunny yellow and filled with books, depictions of ferns, and plaques commemorating numerous awards that Fern has received for service to the university.  Insider her desk is a little cache of chocolate.  Fern is a moderate person, so it’s possible for her to have a big chocolate bar in her office for more than a day. (Speaking of chocolate caches, I found one my husband had hidden in a seldom-used drawer in our guest bathroom.  The sneaky bastard!) Fern shares good things with others: chocolate, comic strips, funny stories.  Fern’s husband Mike is a wonderful cook and baker.  When I worked in the Writing Center with Fern, she’d often bring in his famous chocolate chip cookies. She never passed them off as hers, which is what I would do.

Although Fern and I are the same age, she seems (is) so much wiser and more mature. I suspect she was a wise, mature sort when she was seven.

I think I’m only now entering my mature period. I went through a bad spell last year—change of life, loss of a very good friend, the publication of my book (mostly a good thing, but also some stress with touring, expectations, etc.)—and I think I was bitchy. Fern is never bitchy.

If I need advice, Fern is only a door away. She is a good listener, and always says something nice: “Oh, I like that,” she’ll say, about a scarf or some earrings. “I like that.”

Whenever I see Jenny and Noel, I feel happy. They live down the block, and are almost always together, mother and daughter, daughter and mother.  Jenny looks like she’s twenty-one—thin, petite, and dark-haired. Noel seems a bit older than her six or seven years, but maybe it’s because she’s so darn smart. A few years ago, she told me she wanted to study Hebrew. She plays the violin with perfect form, and she has her own blog.  I interviewed her for my blog some time back. My favorite answer was to the question, “How do you feel about starting St. Anthony School?”  Noel responded, “I feel happy. I can’t wait. Let’s roll! I can’t go on the school bus because my mom is worried. Mean kids are everywhere. I am going with her, but I have to take care of myself. It’s a sad, sad thing. But mom is telling me how. Let’s hear it for Effingham!”

It is a sad, sad thing, but I think the bullies will stay away from Noel.  She is tall and confident and doing very well in school.  Straight A’s.  But she is also a normal kid.  She likes Pet Society on Facebook and is very fond of the neighbor’s cat.  She’s read the first three volumes of the Harry Potter series, but then the action started getting scary so she’s taking a little break.

Her mother Jenny is a brilliant painter who teaches at Eastern. Last summer she was commissioned to paint portraits of two saints for Hedwig House, the Catholic community’s house of hospitality here in Charleston. She asked me whether I’d be willing to pose as St. Hedwig, who was Eastern European. I was thrilled and went around telling people that the reason Jenny asked me was because of my saintly, pious nature. She drew very quickly, asking me to tilt my head to the side, then down. Mozart’s Requiem Mass played on the stereo as rain tapped on the windows.

“Should I try to show any emotion?” I asked. “Should I look mournful?”

“Just relax your face.”

It’s a great portrait, although Hedwig looks mighty well fed for a saint.

Nobody runs a meeting or a retreat like Linda. She is efficient, enthusiastic, encouraging, and organized.  She is direct and honest, but also funny and nice. She never talks too much. She gets things done. A few years back, when there were rumors that our current chair might become a dean, we wondered who his replacement might be. “Linda would be great,” was a common sentiment. One problem was that Linda was close to retirement. In fact, she will be leaving us this year. Who will run our retreats? Who will come around on Fat Tuesday handing out beads? With whom will I talk about baseball?

Linda and I are proof that people of all backgrounds, races, genders, nationalities, etc. can get along. She is a Cubs fan, while I root for the White Sox. Before I met Linda, I hated the Cubs. I made fun of the Cubs. Constantly. I’d go into gift stores in Chicago where Cubby teddy bears were sitting next to Cubby coffee mugs, and I’d stuff the little bears head first into the mugs.  But Linda is not a baseball hater. She cheers for the Cubs, but sometimes also for the Cardinals (yes, I KNOW—in some circles this is heresy.) And she likes the White Sox. I think she saves her hate for more important targets, like bigots.  Because of Linda, I’ve become a more reasonable fan.

Linda and I both understand the importance of mid-February—pitchers and catchers report to work.  This means that spring is near. Somewhere, in Arizona or Florida, it is already spring! And with spring comes Opening Day and with Opening Day comes hope and the promise of a new beginning.

If someone had told me as an adolescent that friendship is one of the most important things in life, I would have said “Shove it up your Pollyanna ass.”  That’s because when I was an adolescent, people were the problem. People made fun of my buck teeth and my clumsiness and my shyness. The people at home weren’t always that great either. Lots of arguing, lots of rules.

I had some friends as a girl.  There was Daina, whom I’ve written about, both in White Field and in a separate blog in Daiva’s Month of Friendly Love.  A little later there was Tony, who was even more of an outsider than I was.

In high school I hung around with the theater crowd. We did things as a group: acted in plays, went to see plays, smoked up in Billy Lee’s basement while talking about plays. We were a diverse bunch: gay, straight, male, female, nerdy, flamboyant, ambitious, stone-all-the-time. None of these friendships went beyond high school, though I am deeply grateful for them for giving me a sense that I was not a complete and total loser.

In college I discovered men. Who needed friends when there were men out there who would take me places, entertain me, and, most importantly, buy me drinks. My relationships with women were superficial. (Not that jumping into bed with a series of men provided any great meaningful contact.)  It’s not that I didn’t want women friends, but potential candidates sensed that I was much more interested in getting attention from men—and were wary, keeping their boyfriends at bay.

When I got married, at twenty-eight, I only had five bridesmaids, including the maid of honor. In my large ethnic community, five was nothing. I’d heard of women who had ten, thirteen, fifteen.

I began to find friendship important when I got sober and divorced, in that order. The women at AA were supportive, smart, and funny, and couldn’t care less what I did or who I was married to or what I looked like.  I was still leery of intimacy, of saying things and meaning them, of speaking up, of saying no sometimes.  I was in therapy for a long time, struggling not only with sobriety issues, but with man problems. My wise shrink told me something I remember to this day: when you have good relationships with women, you’ll begin to have good relationships with men.

This proved to be true, and I am grateful to Judy for pointing this out, and for encouraging me to delve deeply but patiently into the magical waters of friendship.