Walking the Wall

Have you ever had a day that just seems to go wrong with each and everything you do? You go to use your laptop and it dies, you pick up a pot and it crashes to the floor and spills everything, you have to spend half and hour trying to plug in a USB cord when the plug is in the back of a tower that is inside of a giant desk so that you have to do contortions just to get your arm to reach to the back, you leave to go to the post office and don’t bring the package, and etc. etc. etc. ad nauseaum. For most of today I have been stuck in that feeling of grabbing for everything and getting it yanked away…sortof like Spoons…

Have you ever played the card game Spoons? I never have until last weekend at a Halloween party and it was quite an initiation into the game! Now, in doing a Google on the term, I came up with a great deal of variation on the rules, with additions of rules such as razzing and drinking to make it EXTRA interesting and…dangerous–all of them have the spoons laying in the center of the table, enough for everyone playing–minus one. We played a simple version of everyone getting 5 cards and at the yell of GO! Everyone lays down a card in front of the person on their right and then picks up the card the person on their left has laid down. This proceeds around the table at an alarmingly fast (for me) rate as everyone tries to come up with four of a kind. The first person to get a four of a kind grabs for a spoon and then all hell breaks loose as everyone else grabs a spoon (minus one). Whoever is left without a spoon gets a subsequent letter in the words "S P O O N S" until the last letter when they are out of the game.It reminded me of the game in gradeschool where there are not enough chairs and the music plays and everyone runs around and around until the music stopped and you tried to get a chair and not get left standing–I always managed to be stuck standing!

It sounds so simple to say "everyone else grabs for a spoon" but there is nothing simple about the process. It isn’t just an exaggeration to say "all hell breaks loose" because it does. Wives attack husbands, men arm wrestle and gouge, friends shove friends aside, all ties are broken when it comes to getting ahold of a spoon–and keeping ahold of it. Chairs are upending, the table moves dangerously, the table cloth is yanked, pushed, pulled, ripped, and thrown, people (and even blood) fly everywhere–did I mention these are all grown adults?? I cannot even begin to imagine adding alcoholic beverages to this game.

So that was the first half of my day, always grabbing for a spoon and coming up short, but then I got to take a deep breath on the 45 minute trip up to college, listen to some foolish grinning kind of music, and by the time I got into class I was refreshed and ready to discuss the issues of gender, cannibalism, and the marginalization of the other in order to maintain superiority in Dicken’s Arctic Encounter and Melville’s Moby Dick…and I tell you, on this one, Dicken’s was the one to come up short on spoons…or chairs for that matter.