The
last time my adult kids and I played Scrabble was the evening of July
21st in 2006, a Friday. Of course Alan, who lives in the Boston
area, isn't around much to play any games. But Cobie, our
daughter, lives only three miles from us here in Corvallis, Oregon,
and we have never played that game since then.
That
afternoon we had buried their 94 year old grandfather, my father
Frank, who had died three days earlier. The prompt funeral was to
accommodate the religious preferences of my younger brother, Hank,
whose side of the family are Mormons.
We
wanted to do something that evening rather than just sit around
feeling sorry for ourselves, and Alan was returning to Boston the
next day. I broke out the Scrabble board, since that had always been
one of our favorite games. (It was family lore how Uncle Don had
once placed the word "earwax" on such good squares that he
got an ungodly number of bonus points.)
Dad
had gone down hill rather abruptly, much to our shock. A very
talented musician, he had sung with his small church choir on the
last Sunday in June. I have joked that one reason he lived so long
was that he was the choir's only bass and he didn't want to let down
the team.
But
that may not entirely be a joke. Dad, whose long career had
alternated between teaching music in the public schools and
electronic engineering, was still very much into music. After my
mother had died five years earlier, he began driving sixty miles
every week from his home in Woodburn, Oregon to rehearsals with the
Corvallis Community Band in which I was playing clarinet, and in the
summers, concerts in the park immediately after the rehearsals.
Four
months earlier, having just turned 94, he had played his baritone
in our annual formal concert, which included some very challenging
Russian music. Other members of the baritone section reported that he
had more than held his own. Of course he had been playing the
baritone for 80 years, so he should have been good.
Although
Dad at age 94 was still in decent shape, my brother and I were
naturally worried about him living alone, but he didn't want to
move. Hank, who lived in Las Vegas, phoned him every day to check
up on him, and I drove up to Woodburn several times a month for a
visit.
As
a retired electronics engineer, Dad had taken to computers like the
proverbial duck to water. To reassure us, after Mom died he had
begun emailing us first thing in the morning that he was up and on
the air. In the subject line of his email he would always put "AOK."
He
may have picked up this expression, meaning "first rate ok,"
from fellow engineers who in turn may have picked it up from the
pioneering
U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard,
reporting on his excellent condition during his first flight into
space in 1961.
I
am not very observant of the condition of other people, and despite
the fact that Dad and I were visiting nearly every week, Hank was the
first to detect, over the phone, that something had suddenly gone
very wrong with him. Hank alerted me and I took Dad to see his
doctor.
Dad
was unable tell the doctor, when asked, who the current president of
the United States was, or to answer other questions that he should
have been able to answer without any trouble.
This
was a terrible shock. After all, here was a guy who was still
buying growth stocks while in his 90s. And he had just renewed his
subscription to Time
magazine for two years! When winding up his estate I was able to get
refunds of over $2,000 for his subscriptions to a number of
investment guru newsletters and other publications.
A
brain scan revealed that Dad was suffering from a subdural
hematoma, probably as a result of hitting his head in a fall.
This is "a
pool of blood between the brain and its outermost covering."
Given
Dad's advanced age and other medical conditions, the surgeon said
that he could not in good faith operate. After being shuttled
between our house in Corvallis, the hospital, and a nursing home,
he died a few days later on July 18.
That
evening was the regular weekly Corvallis Community Band concert in
the park. Knowing the importance of music to Dad and musicians' "the
show must go on" attitude, I elected to play, and Alan came
along as a guest musician, sight reading a percussion part.
While
Dad was fading away at the nursing home, Cobie brought her viola and
Alan his cello and played special concerts for him.
Before
I describe our Scrabble game the evening of the funeral, a few words
about coincidence and probability are in order. In a recent
interview
in the Times Magazine, Herman Daly said:
"I
do think there's a creator. I don't think you can say life is an
accident, which is really what scientific materialism says.
Neo-Darwinism has gotten a free ride philosophically for a long
time. When you calculate the compound probability of all these
infinitesimally probable events happening at once to generate life,
it becomes quite absurd. The Neo-Darwinist types say, 'Yes, we
accept that, that's mathematics.' It's totally improbable that life
should have originated by chance in our universe. 'But we have
infinitely many unobserved universes!' Infinitely many universes,
unobserved? 'Mathematically it could have happened!' And our
universe is the lucky one? They look down their noses at religious
people who say there's a creator: That's unscientific. What's the
scientific view? We won the cosmic lottery. Come on."
According
to probability theory if we were to put a large enough number of
monkeys typing randomly on enough computers for long enough,
ultimately they would produce the works of Shakespeare, the Bible,
the Encyclopedia Britannica, and today's entire issue of the The
New York Times!
But how long would be long enough for this to happen? I suppose
this is an extreme case.
But
what does probability theory have to do with a Scrabble game played
in 2006?
The
three of us began our game, on the evening of my father's funeral.
We each picked up one of the well-shuffled, face-down letter tiles,
to determine who would play first. Then we returned the three tiles
to the table, shuffled everything again, and began drawing our
seven personal tiles.
I
drew my first three tiles and was about to draw some more, when I
noticed that the letters I had drawn were A, O, and K.
This
was rather a shock, as we immediately recognized the letters which
our late father and grandfather had placed in the subject box in his
daily email assuring us that he was ok.
Was
Dad letting us know that he was ok? Or did I just drawn those
particular letters by chance?
We
can calculate the rough probability here. In Scrabble, there are 9
tiles with the letter A, 1 with the letter K, and 8 with the letter
O, out of a total of 100 tiles. Your chances of drawing an A are
therefore 9 out of 100, your chances of drawing a K are 1 out of
100, and of drawing an O are 8 out of 100. The chances of drawing
these exact three letters are therefore approximately 72 (9 X 1 X
8) out of 1,000,000 (100 X 100 X 100), or about one chance in
13,889. (The actual calculation is more complex, but this is in the
ball park.)
So
the letters A O and K could
have turned up by chance. But what were the odds this particular
chance would occur on the very same day we had buried the man who
used exactly these letters in his daily emails?
A
love letter from beyond the grave? Of course there is no way to be
sure. But it well might have been a sign that Dad, one more time,
had managed to let us know that he was indeed AOK.
We
still don't know what to make of this experience. But seventeen years
later, we have never played Scrabble again.
