At one time, Calgary, Canada, boasted the largest Scrabble club in North America. It was all due to Siri, who started it with a group of six British ex-pats like me. Siri became an evangelist for the game.
“We’ll turn our membership into a hundred within the year,” he declared, and went out and rented the basement of a church every Wednesday evening.
“Siri, why commit yourself when we only have six players?” I asked.
“Build it and they will come,” was his answer.
Lo and behold, at one stage we had 128 members, hosting the most frequent and largest Scrabble tournaments in North America, including The Western Canadian Open.
Players came in from all over the world. Many of us volunteered to be hosts. My job was to ferry players to and from Calgary Airport.
One of them happened to be Bill, from the interior of British Columbia. He looked exactly like the Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss – tall, unkempt, and scrawny. Strands of hair, an apology for a moustache, flew out of either side of his face like cats’ whiskers.
Out of over a hundred out-of-towners, trust me to be lumbered with a miserable taciturn. The man would say not a word.
I never had a chance to play Bill at the tournament. He was seeded at the bottom of our lowest division, while I was placed at the bottom of the first. Being an extrovert, I did my level best to draw the man out. He wouldn’t budge. He was deaf to all my sallies.
Out of nowhere came inspiration.
“Bill, I heard you were a writer.”
There was continued silence as usual. A hostile tried to cut into my lane, inches from me. About to honk, I heard a slight cough from beside me.
“I once wrote a book called Shoeless Joe,” he glanced at me sheepishly. “A director read it and turned it into a movie.” I was too busy fending off a highway marauder.
“The director renamed it Field of Dreams… you may have heard of it.”
