There are good summers – the ones that linger in your memory for the rest of your life, the ones that even while you’re living them, make you marvel at how they could ever even happen. I had one of those three years ago.
There are bad summers. Those are the ones where you actually hope the warm weather ends as quickly as possible, making it easier to stay longer at work and bundle up in cool fall weather, and put the dullness or misplaced passion or void of long nights and too-early mornings behind you. I had one of those five years ago.
And then there’s this summer. I can’t call it good – not after being put in a position where I had to decide to kill my dog, not after watching my father struggle in a long, slow, post-surgery recovery, his 79 year old body barely gaining purchase on health in the face of pain and invasion. I also can’t call it bad. It started on a good note, with a long spot of foreign and domestic travel and powerful experiences and learning. The weather has been a bit humid for Maine but by no means intolerable. The boy is loving his time here, which is turning August into a slow but steady return to normalcy after the intense shock and grief of July. I have a new job starting next month but it’s been far enough in the future to seem still a bit unreal – which is perfect for summer. Summer is supposed to feel languid and endless but only because we’re putting its end out of mind. A new job starting after Labor Day in a country which is hot enough in February for me to think of it as “summer” is just what I need.
With the dog gone, and with a bit of mourning behind me, I’ve played a lot of golf these past few weeks, during the day while the son has been in day camp – the same one I went to 35 summers ago. I love golf, pointless though it is, especially in its friendly Maine municipal course form. The dress code is, basically, “no shirts, no shoes, no tee time,” and most courses have a secret corner where a poorly bearded guy is selling some combination of used golf balls, popsicles, beer, and weed, while he sits in an aluminum beach chair and drinks the beer or smokes the weed or eats the popsicles, according to personal choice and when you happen to come across him. On the flip side, I played the private country club course in the town I grew up in on Friday, where there was an actual dress code and since I didn’t have a member number (I was a guest), I couldn’t buy beer from the cart lady, and was reminded why I try to never play private courses. But for the last two weeks, I’ve parked the car, grabbed my clubs, paid my fee, and hit a mix of great and lousy shots off a mix of grass, dirt, cart paths, and sand, and at the end of it, drank Miller Lite with an assortment of mildly sunburned locals also downing Miller Lite and complaining about the Red Sox. Then I’d fire up a heater, talk around the parking lot ashcan with a groundskeeper or some other reprobate, throw the clubs back in the trunk, and head off to pick up the son from camp.
Evenings have had a kind of rhythm varying only by week. The first week of August was mellow. It was properly hot – well, for Maine; it was around 32C or so, maybe a bit more some days – and the boy was still getting used to Maine summer camp, which consists of a day of trooping around a mix of forests and open fields, playing an assortment of badly organized team games which vaguely resemble sports (a soccer kind of game in a fenced in field where you sort of have a goal but are mostly trying to keep the ball away from everyone else, for example), doing arts and crafts involving stunning amounts of plastic string called gimp, swimming in a smallish pool or in a brackish pond, and being reminded to drink more water, put on more sunscreen, and not needing to be reminded to put on more bug spray. It was culture shock for him coming from Seattle: no theme to the week (it wasn’t soccer camp, or skateboarding camp, or nature camp – it was just camp), and the kids all had Patriots t-shirts and even at age six could rattle off the starting lineup for the Red Sox and comment intelligibly on last night’s performance out of the bullpen. At the end of the day he was hot, dusty, smelly, and very tired – exhausted not just physically but socially, adapting in realtime to a new cultural form. We’d head over to the rehab facility to visit my dad, then go back home, stopping for fried clams or burgers or at the market to get a steak for the grill. Then after dinner, we’d pull out a board game – Sorry the first couple of nights but then somehow Monopoly came up, and that became the new nightly goal.
When I was a kid, my parents would rent a place on a lake in western Maine, Kezar Lake, and my days consisted of swimming, hiking, trying to fish (I’m pretty sure I never caught anything, ever), and endless, endless card games and board games and jigsaw puzzles. For cards, it was gin rummy mostly, maybe a little cribbage; for board games, Sorry, Life, Risk, eventually Trivial Pursuit (although only at night for that one) were the staples. My mom loved them and was reasonably good at them; my father tolerated them, I think seeing them as a bit irrelevant (to what, I wasn’t quite sure). My grandmother was ruthless and, despite being lovely and warm and blueberry-shaped and perfect as a grandmother in most regards, was more than happy to take advantage of every rule – especially the complicated ones that would confuse us at age seven and eight – to deny us a turn, to steal points and fake dollars because we forgot what property we owned or missed a 15 when we counted off a double run, basically to win without compunction or mercy. Afterwards she’d cackle, boasting about skunking me or how she had bankrupted my mom or made my sister go back to start four turns in a row, and then hug us and go back to helping us cheat on crossword puzzles. Given that my mom was a nun in her earlier days and still lived accordingly, it was the perfect summer contrast. We loved our grandma.
So the son discovered Monopoly last week, which sort of surprised me. It’s a rather complicated game, really; between buying properties, then developing them, collecting rent and paying it, Chance and Community Chest cards sending you this way and that, jail and getting out, and then things like Luxury Tax and Income Tax – it’s really not something I’d think six year olds would comprehend, let alone enjoy. But he took to it immediately. Apparently he played a Junior Monopoly game in his after school program at the Wallingford Boys & Girls Club – which looking up online, is so dumbed down a version of the real thing that it barely deserves the shared name. But we set up the board, he chose the little doggie piece (I went race car, grandma snagged the top hat), and we were off.
I’ve mentioned before how much he loves Sorry. He loves bumping people back to start, loves the strategy of when to swap on an 11 card and when to hold a pawn just outside of start to see if you get a “back 4” card and can go straight into your safety zone, loves splitting 7s. We’ve been playing it for a year, but seeing him start to slowly build a concept of the strategy of a much more complex game, it’s beautiful to watch how his mind and his whole being absorb the mix of rules, and choice, and chance involved in the game. Proper board games involve some element of chance, and in so doing they replicate life. Sorry is the perfect starter game in that regard. The “chance” comes from the shuffling of the deck of cards, so that’s obvious, but unlike, say, Candy Land, there is real (if limited) choice involved. You don’t simply flip a card and do what it says. A few of the cards require you to decide something – 7s allow you to split up the move between two pawns, 11s let you either move 11 steps forward or swap with any other piece, the Sorry card lets you choose which other player you want to bump back to home – and although most of the cards force you to do whatever move is on the card, if you have more than one pawn out on the board, you still have to choose which pawn you’ll move. It’s that first intersection of elements – chance, choices, and rules – that begins to open up a child’s mind to how the world really works.
These three vectors of operation are, really, entirely unrelated – in a certain mathematical sense, they are operators without intersection. Chance is pure: we cannot predict what will happen (let’s put aside for the moment our ability to count cards and figure out with rough probability what the next turn of card will bring). In Monopoly – assuming the dice aren’t loaded – there are just 11 possible moves, two through twelve spaces, and if we’re smart we can figure out a likely distribution of potential outcomes but we can only map a distribution, we can’t predict certainty of the next roll. On my son’s first game, he unwittingly was able to buy the three orange properties, St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue, and New York Avenue, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which also happen to be the most likely spaces on which a player will land during the course of the game. When you end up in Jail – and there are quite a few ways to get there – you eventually will have to roll the dice when you get out, and the most likely spaces you’ll land on – with rolls of 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 – will be the Pennsy, St. James, Tennessee, and New York. He had the cash and he built hotels on the properties and within about ten rounds bankrupted my mom and was close enough to bankrupting me (and it was close to bed time) that he won without difficulty.
He doesn’t really understand that but we talked tonight about how the rolls of the dice have a fixed probability (in six year old language) and talked about how brilliant his strategy of building hotels as soon as he could on those properties was (even though he was just building for the sheer joy of acquiring the little green houses and then replacing them with the solid little red hotels). We started a game last night and he managed to buy New York Avenue first, and then St. James Place, and then I bought Tennessee Avenue and he was incredibly disappointed. Every turn he tried to convince me to sell him Tennessee Avenue – with amazingly poor negotiating skills, alas (“I’ll trade you Connecticut Avenue for Tennessee Avenue Dad” / “No, but I’ll trade Tennessee Avenue for Boardwalk and $500” / “Huh?”). But he had started to understand (admittedly, from a linear rule, “these are the most likely spaces to land on and therefore you should try hard to get them”) and started to put it into action.
At another point, owning Boardwalk, he tried to convince my mom to trade for Park Place. He said he’d give her Connecticut Avenue. Obviously she said no, but I recommended that he offer to pay all of his cash – at least $2500 – for it. Mom immediately thought that was a good idea – if he paid all of his cash, he’d be unable to build anything for at least a few turns – but he was crestfallen. How could he give up all of his cash? He’d be bankrupt. I told him no, he’d have all of his property and he’d still collect $200 every time he passed Go, and he’d eventually be able to build the most expensive rental properties on the board. But the idea of giving up all of his cash, which somehow felt more real than the properties from which he was collecting the cash in the first place, was too much. He got a little upset about the concept of such a trade at all.
No worries. He’s learning. Eventually he’ll see that cash at an early stage of the game is only cash, but the potential for returns at a later stage – especially in a game in which chance is always in operation, therefore the long term distributions of outcomes is more important than the next individual outcome – is far more valuable.
He’s moved beyond Sorry, although I have to admit that I enjoy Sorry much more. The game moves more quickly, especially when calculation is involved. My son’s math skills are good, but a good piece of Monopoly is being able to project the probability of a given property being landed on versus the cost of construction on said property and the relative scale of rents – a multifactor probabilistic equation that takes quite a bit of human computing power to say the least. But in terms of pace, he’s still just getting to the point where he can make change properly when being paid $24 in rent for Virginia Avenue when he owns all three purple properties and I give him a $50 bill because I don’t have smaller bills with which to make change. That takes a good two or three minutes to get through the subtraction. But his mind somehow does see the overall block transform equation of buying early, building quickly, and minimizing your own liquidity to that which you can kind of expect to need for a given spin around the board. Our minds can absorb the entirety of a system of chance, choice, and rule pretty well even when we can’t articulate it well at all – or do basic arithmetic.
My upbringing was a mix of gentle and sometimes shame-based moral instruction, mostly around rules but with a good dose of acknowledgement of the random and unpredictable nature of a (very Catholic) God whose motives and needs we cannot understand, with choices we make subject to those rules but with plenty of recognition of the fact that our choices are blind and we can only be faulted when we have very good information, and a very good sense of the rules, and still choose an obviously bad choice. Games reinforced that at every step: sometimes (as happened to my mum over and over again) you land on Community Chest and get the “Pay Medical Bills of $100” card, and you land on the Income Tax spot over and over again with dulling regularity. But sometimes you trade New York Avenue for North Carolina Avenue plus $500 and only later realize the other player has now dunned you four times running as you come out of Jail for $1000 for hotel rental, realize that you made the total wrong choice even though you’re a forty-three year old banker who should know better, and yeah, maybe you made an easy trade because your son is six, but it was still stupid. And he won. And you lost because you should have lost, because you should have seen it coming.
My parents taught me a morality in which chance was always present, where the rules were clear, but also a morality in which our choices were our own and had to be accepted as such. The games we played reinforced those in a funny, happy, colorful way, where there was no actual morality at stake – there was no harm to another, we never hurt them or struck them down in their soul – and because it was free of real consequence, the teaching was easy. Chance and rules instilled in my entire being the nature of mathematics; choice reinforced the hard fact that there is no living without decisions and consequence.
I sensed a kind of electricity when my son first showed a desire to play old fashioned board games and card games, and now I know why: loving games means he’s open to the notion of learning how the world works. And I’m hopeful that he’ll see the pointlessness of those games which involve deceit as part of their fabric. There are, of course, other kinds of games than those that combine choice, chance and ruled in a closed loop. For example, I don’t view chess or Go as being truly adult games in that sense because they are just a set of rules and choices. Chance has no role in such games; it all comes down to the rules and the choices players make in executing moves based on those rules. It’s why it’s so easy to build supercomputers which can beat us at such games; without chance, it’s all about crunching the logical conclusion of rules given the current state of the game, and processing power can always be engineered. Another kind of game, though, is exemplified by poker: there is chance, there are rules (the ranking of outcomes), but there’s also not so much strategy as strategic deception. Such games are built around the idea that we have a capability for deceit. Yeah, sure, we do. My son is capable of deceit (“I don’t like fish,” even though he devours salmon sushi like a bear in the fall), but teaching him that that is a route to success is, well, maybe there is a kind of realism to it, but there’s also a kind of curse.
I played a lot of Diplomacy in high school. That has no chance whatsoever; it’s a game of pure rules, pure choice, and decisions about deceit. I loved it, and it helped me understand other people, but mostly it helped me understand the hopelessness of people who were fueled by deceit and rules, who viewed their ability to combine the two as a kind of elixir to winning. No one ever felt good about the outcome of a game of Diplomacy; people felt cheated, and one player felt smug, but no one felt good.
After dinner this evening, after I had cleaned the table and my mom had started to wash the dishes, I went out for a walk, retracing my evening walk with the dog, an excuse for a cigarette but also a need for ritual with a soul who I had wronged. While washing, my mom talked to my son. He said he wanted to be a banker, just like his father. His father was a really good banker, so he said, and he was teaching him to be a banker too. My mom reminded my son that he had said before that he wanted to be a counselor at the Boys & Girls Club and help other children. My son said well, he’d do that during the week, but on Saturdays, he’d be a banker, and that would be enough.
We played Monopoly when I got back. I’ve built a few houses on the red properties, just around the Free Parking corner from the orange properties which killed me the last game. I’m doing pretty well. My son is doing a bit better, somehow collecting rent on his motley collection and hitting the right Chance and Community Chest cards, but he can’t yet buy Park Place off of his grandma and I won’t trade Tennessee Avenue for love, or money, or even all of his railroads plus love and money too. We’re in for a long game.