The Last Scrabble Game (a strange bit of family history)

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.