Not Losing Is A Little Like Winning

It was Scrabulous. And she was waxing my you know what.
I was dying. She was so good. How did she learn to get all those double letter/side-by-side word points anyway?
I’m her mother. I should have been ahead. I taught her everything she knows!
And yet…I was dying.
Thank God it was a long-term game.
You can do one of those if you have a Facebook add-on for Scrabulous. The game goes on until someone runs out of tiles. You play it sort of like those old farts at the park play chess…one move at a time – each a week apart. Our Scrabulous game lasted at least ten days.
It gave us time to think about it, to weigh our words.
Her words weighed more. She really bested me playing horizontal combos like SENE against words like TOFT and PHONEY with ALONE at the vertical to make mega-points. I was stuck in monosyllable-land and my score reflected it.
The word that saved me was RUBIGO. Where did I get that? A color retrieved from somewhere in the almost lost wells of my memory. It just happened to fall on a red triple word score square.
It was a momentum turner. She was easily sixty points ahead at the time.
But step by step, inch by inch I moved forward until we reached that point where I had three tiles and she had five.
CENT was her choice and it placed her thirteen points ahead with one tile remaining.
The three in my cache were less than stupendous. Each was a single pointer: R – U – N
I worked at it forever. And finally I saw an opening. Vertically, there was a space where I could spell URN while connecting with a horizontal T at the top to spell UT and a horizontal BAR at the bottom to spell BARN. All together I would make thirteen points. Not enough to win, but not so little as to lose, either.
But who ever heard of UT? Is it a word????
I had to try. I entered the letters and pressed Play.
The screen whirled around verification mode and then accepted my play.
Game over! A Draw! Hallelujah! I didn’t lose!
She didn’t reply for two days.
It was as if it never really happened.
Heck! Not losing was like winning as far as I was concerned. I just wanted a little victory relish to top it all off. But she didn’t concede a thing.
I finally had to ask.
What, that?
Yes, that.
Well, I don’t really even get it. It was a draw? How did that happen?
Uh…because I’m so good? I came back from the dead. I caught your little baby butt and danced all around it....
I didn’t say any of that. I was cool.
But I still have the screen saved and I look at it frequently.
Life goes on, this I know.
And not losing helps the passing just a bit.