In fifth grade, Sam designed a presidential election board game. The year was 2008 and Obama was running against John McCain. The game resembled Chutes and Ladders in that you rolled a die and sometimes randomly got to leap forward or get pushed back. If you landed on a trivia square, you drew a question card; if you answered correctly, you got another roll of the die. We made the question cards out of cut-up greeting cards and researched the elections on the web. There were questions about delegates and electoral votes, primaries and past presidents. We drew the game board on poster board, which I had laminated. Sam did this just for the hell of it, because he loved board games and played them almost every night. I daydreamed of his selling the game design to Hasbro or Mattel, but he wouldn't even take it to school to show it to Mrs. Pryce, his exuberantly kind and sensible fifth grade teacher.
This is why it will be very difficult to get rid of most of the board games in the cupboard. Though we rarely play now - when we do, it's usually an electronic checkers board - each of the games in the cupboard is powerfully evocative of Sam. We've probably played every game at least 25 times, and some of them a hundred times or more. Most painfully, Clue, which requires three players and which Emma gamely (so to speak) played several times a week for a year. How many times can you work up an interest in Miss Scarlett and the dining room and the lead pipe? Also, Sorry!, which was fun in the beginning when it reminded us of Carol Burnett but got old pretty quick, and Aggravation, and Simpson's Monopoly, only slightly less stultifying than regular Monopoly. We still play backgammon with a real board sometimes.
Sam is in Florida now, looking at colleges and thinking big thoughts. I'm keeping the games so I'll have them ready to play, when he comes home during the semester break, and later, just for a visit. I'm keeping the elections game to play with his boy some day, just like he's always saying.
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