Hey.
Today's my sister's birthday and would have also been my parent's 40th anniversary.
They were married twice. Eloped on this date in Reno, and then married in a church the next month.
Legend has it that my father only had about twenty bucks on him after the wedding ceremony and couldn't afford a hotel room. Sidled up to the blackjack table, and through a combination of guts, luck, and thousands of hours of gambling experience, earned enough cash to garner a room for the young couple.
My father loved games. The ritual of gaming. The patience needed to learn specific rules and patterns each game demanded. Through him, we children discovered that games taught us countless lessons about ourselves: how we coped with stress, how we stuck through and finished the game no matter what, even if we were losing, and what our character truly was when the elements of being prepared, being lucky, and being crazy came into alignment and we were actually winning.
These weren't always welcome lessons. I'd often be surprised and embarrassed by my own arrogance, or insanely angry and jealous that my siblings were able to dominate a game over and over again. But I kept playing, kept paying attention.
Nowadays, I don't really run with a group of game playing friends. The ones that do play extremely detailed wartime strategy games which require a rule book the size of a baby's head. Those aren't fun, to me. If you can't describe the goal of a game in a single breath, I don't want to play it. It may take my whole life to become good at said game, but the general conceit should be elegant and simple.
So, what do I do? My Connect Four set hasn't been opened since I bought a new copy after wearing the old one out. Yeah, I would wear Connect Four boards out, I would make friends violently angry with me at how fast I'd beat them. My playing cards, my scrabble board, my Munchkin set, my Gloom cards collect dust in a closet. I play video games and take on fifteen players at a time in Words with Friends, winning 90 percent of my games.
But there's one game in that closet which makes me sad I haven't got to play with real, living souls in a long while: Monopoly.
No one is casual about Monopoly. You either love it or hate it. It's not a short, conversational game. You don't play it with people you barely know, or the dark truths uncovered will stun you.
But it's my favorite game. I remember my father teaching us kids the rules, the craft and guile one could use to make trades. It was one of the first games where he stressed to us how important it was to stick through it. Winners and losers were made in seconds, and even the best preparation depended on luck to strike.
And we adored him for it. Even though he didn't coddle us and beat us time and time again. I started playing him Monopoly when I was about ten and didn't win a single game with him until I was seventeen. That's the sort of person he made me: one who spent years and years reading up on monopoly strategies, playing thousands of hours and not seeing any positive growth. Just hoping that the time spent doing this made me more proficient, and would proffer success. If that's not a metaphor for my acting career now, I don't know what is.
Summers with my brother and sister were non-stop Monopoly games. A single round would often last days and days. We'd fall asleep huddled around the board - a hastily written note tossed in the center to remind us whose turn it was to play.
Through Monopoly, we developed a catch phrase. When someone lost, after all their money and property had been sold and they landed on one rent too rich for their blood, we'd taunt them, saying: "Well, all we have to do now is just take your piece off the board". A mere swipe of a hand, and their entire existence in the game, wiped out.
Pretty grim stuff for children.
But, looking back on it now, I think only having your piece on the board left to take shows a quiet, defiant strength. We've all played rounds of Monopoly with less disciplined people who, upon hitting a rough spot of luck, toss their cash and property to the banker and just give up. That's no fucking way to live.
The game ends for everyone eventually.
You must play it completely.
Even if you're not winning.
Even if the backhanded deals aren't going your way and the dice rolls don't shine in your favor.
And, if you find yourself a lowly shoe clopping onto Marvin Gardens with four houses and twenty dollars left to your name, you smile. You smile goddamn wide. You played this wonderful, cruel game well, and I love you for it. You take your piece off the board.
