Life has a way of taking your own carefully crafted list of priorities and blowing it right to smithereens. I was sure that today’s biggest story – and the topic of today’s blog entry – would be the unceremonious ending of my very favorite computer game, Pathwords. (Briefly, it’s a game – I can’t bring myself to say was a game – in which you have five minutes to find as many words you can in a large block of letters. Each word has to be at least three letters long. You highlight the letters and click on the last one, and if it’s a correct word, the letters immediately disappear and the block of remaining letters settles into place with new letters added at the top.) You score points for the number of letters; unlike Scrabble, it has nothing to do with particular letters. VOX scores exactly the same as CAT.)
First, some history: My sister Randi introduced me to this game several years ago- and I remember then thinking that her score of 1500 was as out of reach for me as a four-minute mile or a triple axel. . . back in those first few days when best score was maybe half that. But then I spent some serious time playing this game and got pretty darn good at it. . . good enough to eventually score 1540. That made me #1 amongst my Facebook friends – until a certain young punk named Joe Torcaso (president of the Carthage Choir) sprinted past me without breaking a sweat, literally days after playing the game for the first time. Then a voice student of mine named Matt Weiskotten got into the thick of it, and suddenly I was choking on the dust of two students instead of one. Redoubling my efforts, I edged past them both, and then did so at least twice more – until my stratospheric score of 2080 seemed like it might be enough to take and hold the top spot. (Or maybe Joe and Matt had moved on to other games?) And then a school mate from Luther named Anita Ward messed everything up with a score of 2170 . . . which to me felt roughly akin to Bob Beamon’s mind-blowing long jump in the Mexico City Olympics. And much as I tried, I found myself unable to reach even 2000, let alone 2080 – and Anita’s mark might as well have been 20,000, for as out of reach as it seemed to be.
And then, three weeks ago, I signed on to Pathwords and was confronted by an unfamiliar banner bearing the news that Zynga, the creator of Pathwords, would be shutting the game down on September 30th. No reason was given – none at all – although I can’t imagine that any explanation would have made me feel any better. I was mad and even a little hurt (crazy, isn’t it?) and incredibly frustrated at the lack of recourse. There was no one to call and protest, and I’m pretty sure that writing my congressman would have done no good either. . . so I did the only thing I could do: I resolved to regain my winning ways with Pathwords in the time remaining to me. I knew it was nothing that mattered at all in the grand scheme of things, nor even in the minor scheme of things, except that this was a computer game that i was actually really good at- and when I was playing it, I felt a little less like an elderly curmudgeon seated on his porch and glaring at the bewildering world around him … and felt more like I had a place in this crazy new century.
Anyway, this unwelcome deadline before the game went dark was probably the main reason why I found myself playing Pathwords with a ferocious sense of focus, every chance I got – which wasn’t that much, thanks to the rather frantic pace of the beginning of the school year. And about a week ago, I finally managed a score of 2000 for the first time since early summer. . . and just yesterday I finally scored a new personal best with 2110. At last , Anita Ward’s score seemed within reach – and I had one more day to do it.
Or so I thought.
This morning, when I tried to sign on to Pathwords, I was greeted with a new banner, announcing that the game had been taken down. (So evidently I was wrong, and the 29th rather than the 30th was the last day.) And just like that, my efforts to be the #1 Pathwords player among my Facebook friends were finished. And what had seemed in the moment like a worthwhile expenditure of time and energy looked like a pointless waste of time.
And if it didn’t feel pointless then, it certainly did about an hour later when I opened up an email from former Tremper choral director Kurt Chalgren and read the stunning news that a vibrant public education advocate named Terry Lawler had died the night before, the victim of a massive heart attack. Terry was a very familiar face around WGTD as one of the co-hosts of our Education Matters program, plus he had been a frequent guest on my Morning Show – and he had been at the studio the day before yesterday and seemed perfectly fine. So this news was shocking and all but impossible to believe- that this big, energetic bear of a man could be here one day and gone the next, just like that. His death is a gigantic loss for our community in more ways than can be counted… and for everyone who knew and admired Terry, this was a brutal reminder that life is short and incredibly precious, and none of us have any way of knowing how long we will be here.
So what’s the message here? In the first couple of hours after I heard this news, I felt like the message was “Don’t waste your time on dumb and pointless games – not when there is so much important work to be done.” But then I got to thinking about our good friend Sam Waller, who died of a massive heart attack late last year and whose death was perhaps even more unexpected because he had been in such good health and good shape. Sam’s sudden death certainly made all of us look at life very differently, but the last thing Sam would have wanted any of us to do is resolve to eliminate fun and games from our lives. Nobody I’ve ever known relished life and enjoyed its fun as much as Sam. But it’s also true that Sam gravitated to fun which he could experience with others and much of it in the beautiful outdoors . . . the kind of fun that replenishes you in mind, body and spirit . . . rather than the kind of “fun” that leaves you isolated and nearly comatose in front of your computer screen. In honor of Terry – and in honor of Sam – I hope I will be much wiser about how I spend whatever time remains to me- wiser in my serious pursuits as well as in my fun, knowing full well that tomorrow might not ever come. And I strongly suspect that all kinds of people in Kenosha are going to bed tonight thinking about the same thing.
pictured above: This is how the screen appeared yesterday afternoon when I finally managed my new personal best score of 2110. My previous personal best, 2080, is right before it. It sure seemed like a very big deal at the time.