When i landed in the US as a child of nine, I felt I had not only traveled in space but also in time. Though it was 1962, behind me lay a 19th-century world of oil lamps, muddy rutted roads, and horse-drawn carts, while before me flickered a vision so sleek and modern there were no shadows and bright-green lawns sprouted cones of mist.
Time traveler became my invisible identity. Secretly, I searched for mentors in movies like The Time Machine (1960), envying Rod Taylor his ability to go back and forth, to witness and control the passage of time. Propelled and buoyed by a utopian vision of the future, he set off, watching the rising hemline on a mannequin in a shop window, then the shop itself disintegrating to dust in an instant, the surrounding buildings crumbling and disappearing, replaced by insect-like cranes scampering on skyscrapers. His present had succumbed to shattered shards. But by moving a crystal-topped lever sharpened to a point like a pen, he could also reverse direction and return to his intact and cloistered world of waistcoats.
I wasn’t quite 10 years old when I fell in love for the first time. She was a married woman with long chestnut hair and magnificent teeth.
Her name was Rachel and she was a character on “Another World,” a soap opera I watched after school, often while eating potato chips dipped in Russian dressing. Rachel was unscrupulous — she married for money, not love — but she meant well. And even if she didn’t, I was infatuated.
Daytime TV is a relic now — just four soap operas are still on the air — but its influence is lasting. Serialized storytelling, a hallmark of so much of today’s “prestige TV” — shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” and “Breaking Bad” — was the essence of soaps. Millions tuned in each weekday to see what scandalous turn their “stories” would take.
“Stand clear of the closing doors!” was all I remember hearing as I woke up on a Monday morning in a cold sweat, dream tears still wet on my face. Even my dreams are nostalgic of crowded places, worst of all the D.C. metro, where Anne Taylor pit stains let out triumphant sighs and 24-year-old dreams go unblinkingly to die. Yet, I couldn’t remember a single trip from the depths of the railway system from the last two years I had used it. I had I once overheard a woman say loudly to her friend on one of the busiest metro routes in Washington, D.C., “Oh, everyone blacks out their trip on the metro.”
Something strange happens when we enter and exit the underground labyrinths of our respective metropolitan subway systems. Emerging in a single file line, within pressed blazers and clasped watches, we glide diagonally out of our subway tunnels like the steady hike of a roller coaster about to nosedive into the day. At some point during that dreaded ascension out of the depths of Hades, we forget the unfiltered encounters we left underground.
It is an accepted norm of competitive Scrabble that for the duration of a game, from the first tile played to the last, the meanings of words are meaningless. Whatever combination of letters offers the best strategic outcome is the right one. A little old lady once played CUNT against me. My teenage daughter laid down FUCKERS. A frequently played word is JEW, defined in some dictionaries as an offensive term for “bargain.” It gets rid of the tricky J and W.
But the nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted a rethinking of the conventional wisdom about the role of words in Scrabble. What started with a call last week for the Scrabble community to support Black Lives Matter led to a proposal by leadership of the North American Scrabble Players Association to eliminate slurs—about 80 in all, plus alternate spellings and inflections, for a total of 238 words—from the master list of words that are permissible in club and tournament play.
Sit under the tree long enough
And you will be covered in blossoms
We will all bury our loves
In the cold earth of springtime