It’s never too late in life to make new friends, but at my age, it is a bit unusual to have three new friends, especially ones with whom I have never had a real conversation and until recently, did not know their names or where they live.
I know them as “Cypes,” “Odess123,” and “Foogu,” and they are my Words with Friends buddies. For anyone who doesn’t know, Words with Friends is an online game very similar to Scrabble. I play it on my iPhone whenever I have those little bits of down time in life where I am waiting for something –– waiting for a train to arrive, waiting for an airplane to land, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, waiting for lacrosse practice to be done. Why didn’t they have this around when the girls were younger and I had all those soccer, dance, and music lessons where I had so much down time? Well, actually, I do remember bonding with the other waiting mothers. That was priceless in itself.
I started playing Words with Friends when I finally got my iPhone this last winter. So it wasn’t even on my radar screen when the big brouhaha happened with Alec Baldwin getting kicked off the plane for refusing to shut down his game on the tarmac when he was asked to do so for takeoff. But now I can understand his addiction and why he may not have complied right away –– it’s a game that keeps you hooked.
I bring this up because of the nature of modern communication and interaction. Where else but in a virtual world would you connect people on a regular basis once a day or once every couple of days –– often more than you would with your real friends in your real community?
In fact, I had become so used to playing at least a couple of daily Word rounds with my buddy Odess123 that when she went off the radar for eight days, I became alarmed.
“I’m really worried about my Words friend,” I noted to my family, who all thought I was crazy 1) to have an online friend and 2) to care that much.
I truly didn’t know if my friend was sick or if she had had a family emergency. I thought she might be traveling, but then I thought she probably would have told me about it. Crazy indeed, especially since I didn’t even know her name.
One of the components of the online game is that you can text your opponent, but only when your game is live. So if you finish a game and you haven’t reached out, your friend could be lost in cyberspace forever. I really thought this had happened. What if my Words friend had passed away, perhaps, and I would never know who she was?
Well, she did come back, and told me that she had been to Alaska on a cruise with her family. Over the last few months we had traded enough texts that I knew she lived in San Diego but had gone to college at Douglass, part of Rutgers University. I knew she had a son and grandchildren in Minnesota, and a daughter in the Chicago area. I knew she had family in northern New Jersey and Connecticut, but I still didn’t know her name. And by some weird online sense of etiquette, neither of us had asked.
That is, until she returned from her trip, and she introduced herself as Arlene. Still, just first name only.
That gave me the incentive to reach out to my two other favorite Word players. “Cypes”, I have discovered is Heather. But I still have no idea where she lives or even what time zone. I know that “Foogu” lives in Dallas, but I don’t know her name. Actually, she might be a guy. I still don’t have enough verbal context clues to know for sure.
This alarms my children, who, in a reversal of roles, are worried that I have online friends, that holy cow, they might somehow be stalkers and I am exposing myself to danger.
But come on. How much danger could be posed by anyone who is obsessed with a word game, someone who finds joy in forming multiple constructions with the addition of just one letter, who revels in collecting new two letter words like “ai” and “re” and “ut”? We may be a scary bunch indeed, but not for the traditional reasons.
I am writing this 30,000 feet in the air somewhere over the southwest part of the United States, continuing my journey from Arkansas where I fell down the rabbit hole into the Wal-mart Innovation Lab for a business trip, through Houston Airport, on my way to meet the girls in Santa Monica, California, before we all head out for Asia.
In addition to the usual chaos of getting ready to leave town for an extended period of time (and making sure the boys are okay to be “batching” it in my absence), I am being a conscientious “Words with Friends” friend and letting my fellow verbal addicts know that I’ll be on hiatus so we should wrap up our current games and not open new ones until I’m back.
It seems like the right thing to do. They’re my friends and I wouldn’t want them to worry about me.
