I play Scrabble on line. One opponent is a live friend Jo, who usually betters me and playing her is a brief daily encounter. One go and wait till tomorrow. After her I’m usually tempted by an invitation to play with what I know perfectly well is a robot. It responds to my move and I make another and so on. It’s fast and exciting. At this point my grandson Callan often joins me. He’s seven and not brilliant at Scrabble yet but I reckon it’s good for his spelling and it gives me a kick to explain words like vanity or poverty or element. One added advantage of playing robotic Mad Dog or Racer is I get offered the chance to know the best possible move I could have made after my turn is played. It appears as a reproachful shadow on the board. Often it’s a crazy word like a species of moth that I couldn’t possibly have known, but sometimes it is an obvious word, and that rankles, but, by and large, it’s good to know.
However I hadn’t really noticed a little bar above the board that did something or other as I was testing out a word. I didn’t really care. I had enough to think about. Then Callan once said “That move is the best” and when I asked why, he explained the function of the bar, how the yellow crept along according to the strength of my choice and had an orgasm of glitters and pink when I hit in the best possible word. “Why do you know that when I don’t.’ I said peevishly. He looked at me with a bit of pity. “It’s because you weren’t born in the twenty first century” he said.
It got me thinking about how to be old now is to be diminished even without dementia kicking in. Once, if I caught a grandchild eating an ice block before dinner and asked imperiously “Where did you get that?” And he answered airily “I found it” I could respond cuttingly “I wasn’t born yesterday” and even add “Tell the truth and shame the devil” before checking the freezer. But the truth of the matter is I was born yesterday, indeed, the yesterday before the yesterday before the yesterday and age no longer augments authority but seemingly undermines it.
I do indeed battle with my technology and my youngest son, Finn, often chivvies me over the phone like a slightly cranky sheepdog, and I try to do what he tells me, admittedly moaning all the while about how hard it is. “See, you’re doing it again - don’t give up” and I realise he’s ’correct” (the new word for right in our household). I know I must persist and try to grow up even though I’m already eighty years old. Life is a game show and I am a contestant, it seems, whether I like it or not.
But I do mourn somewhat the way that wisdom, the erstwhile benefit of a long life, really has little currency any more. I wonder why we, the old, are here on a practical level. I don’t know the answer to that one, but, you know, I think I’ll open up Scrabble and kick the shit out of Mad Dog anyway.
