When we were little, my brother and I loved to play Sorry! by the hour. We’d set up the board on the carpeted floor in our living room in Detroit and hop the pieces around the board, squealing with delight if we could send the other’s pieces back to the start, yelling at each other, “SORRY!” I don’t remember playing any other board games with him. That was it. We invented other things to do with one another, usually having something to do with the tape recorder he received as a bar mitzvah gift from our aunts and uncles. We’d make up plays, or listen to “Peter Pan” or “Peter and the Wolf”. He is five years older than I, so our interests were similar, but not always the same. He always had a heavier academic work load than I did and was out of the house long before I was.

I don’t remember playing board games with my girlfriends. We played dolls of all kinds; Betsy Wetsy, Barbie and Ken mostly. I had a Miss Revlon doll that I really liked, a real fashion plate before Barbie came on the scene.

As I grew older, there would be family games of Yahtzee on Saturday nights if we were all in the house. I believe we would have teams, sometimes the men against the women, or mix it up. Those could be a lot of fun.

I begged for a OUIJA board as an early birthday present in November, 1963. I took it over to the Pearlmans, two doors down, during the time of the Kennedy assassination, when my mother was still in bed, suffering through her nervous breakdown. We spent hours asking that board every question we could think of: who would each of us marry, what would the future hold for each of us (there would be four in the room: me, Ralph, Nancy and Milton). All our hopes and dreams were asked of that disk and letter board. I can’t remember a single answer, but being in that house helped me get through those darks days. It is no wonder that I became obsessed with the Kennedys. My idol had his brains blown out, we were living out a national tragedy, but in my own home, my mother’s mental distress couldn’t let me grieve and mourn with the nation. She couldn’t bear having the TV on, which I desperately wanted to watch, so the Pearlmans offered me solace, while my obsession with all things Kennedy grew.

I played a lot of Solitaire after homework was complete in high school. I sat, spread-legged on the floor between the twin beds in my room and laid the cards on the floor, between my legs, turning them over, searching for aces, kings, high cards to make the suites I needed. Shuffle and start again. A great time sink, while listening to Top 40 radio, with my door closed, avoiding my mother.

Of course, I had Monopoly, but that took forever to play, so it wasn’t brought out often. I have a little note in my childhood game that I once won with (X) amount of money. I played against myself, but didn’t cheat. I was a lonely kid, though I often didn’t mind being alone. I took a trip to Cleveland and Toledo to visit maternal relatives in June and July, 1970, the summer after graduating high school. I remember a cut-throat, dragged out game of Monopoly with my cousins Chuck, Helene, Judy and Gordon. At some point, we started pairing up against one another to defeat each other. Gordon paired with me and together, after hours of play, we won! It was a hard-fought victory. He also told me about (and introduced me that trip) to a cousin of his who would also start Brandeis in September. That was an added bonus.

After graduating Brandeis in 1974, close friend Christie came back to live in Boston in September of that year. Backgammon was all the rage and she taught us how to play. We got together for dinner several times a week. I even cooked then, though she is a much better cook, and after dinner, we would play a chouette, which is what a match is called. We got to the point where we went together to tournaments in Cambridge a few times. Though Dan and I were novices, I took second place in one once and won some money. When we visited Christie at the Playboy Mansion the following year, Hef and others were involved in heavy games with large wagers. We didn’t bet at all. We sat at a second table and asked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar if he wanted to play with us. He said he didn’t bet. We said we didn’t either, but he declined.

When Dan and I were first married, we loved to play Honeymoon Whist, which had a passing resemblance to the Bridge or Hearts that we loved to play in college. While with Bob (my boyfriend before Dan), we used to get a game of Hearts together in his suite with two card decks, get really stoned, then watch the expression on someone’s face if they got the Queen of Spades dropped on them twice! Now Dan plays those sorts of games on his iPhone.

Trivial Pursuit was well-suited to us when Roger and Francine moved back to the Boston area. Roger loved to play board games after dinner. We never got into Risk, but we all loved to play Trivial Pursuit, particularly, the spouses against once another, as Francine and I knew the lit and culture questions and Roger and Dan knew the sports questions. Once they had their young kids (a few years before we had ours), we’d go over for dinner, wait for the children to go to sleep, then pull out the board. I will never forget that somehow we pulled out the answer Vanilla Fudge to some obscure pop tunes questions.

We would occasionally play Scrabble, but once we bought our Vineyard house, and Dan’s parents stayed with us for weeks at a time, the Scrabble board got lots more use, particularly as our children got older, with bigger vocabularies. The dining room table was the location of play and the board game could occupy the entire evening. An official Scrabble dictionary was in the house when we bought it, so we were ready to rumble.

Now the grandparents are gone and the kids never come. The board games are in a cupboard, unused. They bring back memories from childhoods long gone.

We didn't have to sleep, but had to lie quietly for a time, which seemed like forever but couldn't have been more than 15 or 20 minutes.
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I have never personally experienced road rage. I tend to steer clear of drivers who seem to be in too much of a hurry, or are weaving in and out of traffic. I give them wide berth and get away as quickly as I can.

Therefore, I will tell two stories from friends during my days of living in Chicago, one humorous, one deadly. These took place in the late 1970s. One might think life was a bit more civilized then, but perhaps not.

The first involves the mother of a close friend. The woman is one of my surrogate mothers, a smart, savvy woman whom I greatly admire. She was driving in Chicago proper, not a highway, but a busy area. Someone tried to cut her off, but she wouldn’t let him. He pulled abreast of her car and gave her the finger. She looked him straight in the face, put her middle finger up and looked at it, bewildered. She slowly looked at that finger from all angles, up, down, bent, straight. She shook her head at him, shrugged her shoulders and pulled ahead of him, glancing back quickly enough to see his bewilderment in the mirror. She howled with laughter that his act of hostility had prompted such a funny reaction. She left him in the dust.

The other episode happened after the terrible blizzard of January, 1979. It snowed for two days, adding 21″ of snow to the several that were already on the ground. The temperature was 18 below, the wind screamed, causing the wind chill to reach 40 degrees below zero. The blizzard happened over the weekend, but I lived in the city and went to work (our office was at 444 N. Michigan Ave.) on Monday. I tried to take the bus, but the line of people waiting, as full buses passed us by (and the wind howled) was too long, so I decided to pull my front-wheel drive VW Rabbit out of my covered spot and drive to a garage in town (I lived north of Diversey at Seridan and Oakdale), a few miles north of work. I crept to work.

Only those who actually lived in Chicago-proper got into the office that day. By early afternoon, a few flakes fell again and we few hearty survivors who had gotten into the office, fled. I was the only one with a car and dropped two fellow employees (including my manager, the infamous AL from Seven Double Chivases on the Rocks) home before trying to get home myself. I lived the furthest north. All the side streets were one way, every other one in opposing directions. Due to the extreme cold, plows broke down and couldn’t plow the streets. Cars were left, abandoned, blocking various streets. I got to my street, turned in, but a car had been left, blocking the street before I could drive past the few buildings to my driveway. I backed out, went up two blocks to the next left turn, same problem, rinse and repeat. I finally made an illegal left turn one block north of my street. It was clear! I drove up the block, took the left turn to drive down to my street and got stuck just before turning onto my block. My little front-wheel drive car was no longer making contact with the road. I got out, seeking help. I found some guys getting off the bus who came and lifted my car back into the ruts in the road and followed me to my apartment to make sure I got home safely. The storm brought out the goodness in some people. I put my car away and vowed to not move it until spring. I also bought a shovel.

I did take the bus to work for the remainder of the week, and thought this was not fit weather for man or beast. Somehow, I survived. The next week, more souls came back to work. We had two great guys working with us, Vietnam vets, burly guys who were gentle giants and close friends, Ben and Darryl. Darryl was going through a rough patch with his wife, an elegant flight attendant. They had an adorable little girl who had just turned five in December. Her birthday was the day before mine. Darryl’s wife was stuck out of town during the blizzard, so he was on child care duty. This Monday was his first day back in the office. He worked the whole day, then had to stop by his apartment to pick up his suitcase and Betamax (yes, really; we sold video training to the data processing industry so sometimes had to travel with equipment to demonstrate our training materials), before flying to Iowa. He lived on Addison, near Wrigley Field.

Some of us were still in the office, just hanging around at the end of the day. Darryl came into my office (which I shared with three other employees) and goofed around with me. The song playing on the office sound system was Rod Steward, “If Ya Think I’m Sexy”…ooo, what a song! It made me feel sexy. Darryl came around behind me as I sat at my desk and gave me a shoulder rub. We really didn’t think much of it in those days.This was not considered inappropriate behavior by either of us. We were both married. We were just joking with each other. He was a joyous person. He gave me a bear hug. He was a big, bear of guy. I weighed 84 lbs. Then he took off for his trip.

We came into the office the next morning, stunned as word spread about what happened to Darryl when he went to his apartment after leaving the office. He turned up Addison in his car. He only had a limited amount of time, as he had to catch a flight. There was a car blocking the street. It wasn’t stuck. The owner just couldn’t find a parking spot, so the car had been left there with blinkers on. Darryl laid on his horn. Three people came out of the adjacent apartment, two men and a woman, high on crack cocaine. Darryl started yelling at them to move the car! One of the men had a two by four, the other man had a knife. They were amped up; looking for trouble. Darryl was a big, black man, but one of the guys struck him with the board several times and the other stabbed him repeatedly with the knife. Darryl tried to fend them off, but was gravely wounded. He crawled to his apartment building up the block, buzzed the buzzer for help, but collapsed in the doorway. An ambulance came, but he died that night in the hospital. Was this road rage? Cabin fever? Drug-fueled craziness? All of the above.

We, in the office could barely function when we heard the news. Ben, Darryl’s best friend and fellow Vietnam survivor, was speechless; with rage, with horror, with guilt that he wasn’t there to protect and help his friend. My husband and I commuted at this point in our lives and it was his turn to visit me, but he gently suggested that I come to Boston. I could use the change of scenery. So, after attending the funeral on Friday, I flew to Boston. I escaped the blizzard-weary city, the horror of the murder of my friend and colleague, and, for a moment, my Chicago life in general.

I already knew how to read when I got to kindergarten. I could write my first name in capital letters. I also knew colors and numbers and days of the week. This was partly because my sisters thought it was fun to teach me, and partly because, as the third child in the family, I just picked things up on my own. So I should have been bored in kindergarten, but I wasn’t. It was fun to be around lots of other kids my age, since there weren’t any in my neighborhood. Plus there was this little boy named Casey who was kind of cute. . . .

I went to a school called Number Three School, a big, three-story brick building about a ten- to fifteen-minute walk from my house (with five-year-old legs, maybe twenty minutes). It served kindergarten through 8th grade, so my sisters, who were in 6th and 7th grade that year, were both still there. They would walk me to school in the morning and home at lunchtime. Then they would go back after lunch, but since kindergarten was only a half day, I got to stay home with my mother in the afternoons. In case you’re feeling sorry for my sisters for having to walk me home, I should tell you that there was no cafeteria at the school and everyone went home for lunch. I have no idea what the kids with working mothers did, if there were any.

My teacher’s name was Mrs. Sturges, and she seemed ancient, although she was probably younger than I am now. She had gray hair with a purplish tinge to it – all the older teachers at the school had purplish hair because they used something called “bluing” which was popular among women with gray or white hair in those days,

(Note: A quick internet search yielded Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing, still being sold today, marketed as a laundry product, but with the following note on its website: “Countless letters from elderly citizens tell us that Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing is a wonderful addition to the rinse water when washing gray or white hair. It eliminates yellowing and gives their hair that beautiful whiteness which cannot be obtained even by products made especially for that purpose.”)

It must have worked as promised, because those teachers’ hair certainly never looked yellow, but it did look slightly purple and I wondered if they didn’t realize it, or if they liked it like that.

Although I have very vivid memories of first grade the following year, and reasonably good memories of nursery school the previous year, I find that I don’t remember anything about what we did in kindergarten. Except for music. That must have been the activity I liked best, or at least it was the only one that was memorable. We all gathered around the piano and sang while the teacher played. (I am wondering now if kindergarten teachers were required to be pianists in those days.)  Sometimes we sang songs that we already knew, and sometimes she taught us new songs. When there were new songs, I would always position myself right behind her, so I could read the words of the songs over her shoulder. That way I could easily sing them the first time through, and also I didn’t ever have to memorize them. Mrs. Sturges never noticed that I was doing this. One day, we had a substitute teacher, a younger woman, and she saw it immediately, coming up to me after music was over and saying, “you were reading the words to the songs, weren’t you?” I said yes. Apparently she never told Mrs. Sturges though.

At the end of the year when I got my final report card, promoting me to first grade, it said “Reading Ready.” My parents and I got a good laugh over that.