Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller My office at home tends to be a catch-all for things that are in transition. It has piled up with a lot of stuff lately. Our short-lived rocker. The cardboard  electric was quite good enough. I don’t want to call it junk, because it’s not junk, yet. It’s still at the stuff stage. There’s the electric guitar that I got my son for Christmas two years ago. It was a gamble, and I lost. He has played it twice, maybe. But until he feels the urge to take after Jonny Lang, or until I feel the urge to take after him, it has found a home in my office. Or the box of Dickens Village boxes that we inherited from Cindy’s mom, Lorely. You know your office is cluttered when it contains a box of boxes. The village has found a temporary home in our living room on the piano. We left it up after Christmas in honor of Lorely. The village contains a house with a light that goes off and on by its own accord. We think that Lorely is living in it, and sometimes she stays home ...

David Heiller Cindy and I were playing Scrabble on March 16. She was beating me (as usual) by a score of 203 to 114. I took my turn and got up to 138. Then Cindy skipped a turn and traded in her letters for new ones. I made another decent play and got up to 166. So now the score was 166 to 203. Look out, Cindy! But wait. Cindy played the word “cleansed.” It was a Scrabble, which is worth 50 extra points. Plus it started on a triple word and ended on a triple word, which means you multiply the value of the word by nine. So she added 168 points to her score and that, as they say, was all she wrote. She ended up beating me by 235 points. Her margin of victory was more than my total score! There is a Scrabble lesson here: Sometimes you have to cash in your letters and miss a turn in order to improve your chances of success. It’s hard to do, because you give your opponent a chance to catch up. But it often leads to better things, which Cindy illustrated rather bril...