That's life....

Number One Son and I drove back home late last night from our flight from Los Angeles where we spent Christmas with Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming, a week-long trip that was sullied temporarily by a bit of a kerfuffle between me and PC. I never apologized to him for my part in that, although I should have, but the incident gave me some insight into his thinking that will be interesting to watch.

The skirmish arose over a dominoes game called chickenfoot. It's not one of those games that comes in a box with a specific set of rules; in fact, the rules that normally come with a box of double-bigger-than-six dominoes are for a game called Mexican train, which I've never seen played, and I can't find anybody who admits to having ever played it. I don't know of any "official" rules to chickenfoot at all.

Consequently, I learned to play chickenfoot from other players, and I've played with several different groups, whose interpretations of the "rules" tend to vary a bit from one venue to another. One "rule" that tends to be up for discussion is whether the double blank is zero points (in a game where the low score wins) or 50; most groups I've played with make it 50. Another is the number of dominoes in a "hand"; when I looked up rules online several years ago, the number was usually enough to give each player an even number with some quantity left over in a "bone" pile that was usually around 5 or 10 dominoes.

The "rule" in question in LA was whether a player who could not play on a turn should have to draw from the "bone pile" until they drew a "player"—which could mean that one person could draw as many as five or six dominoes in our case. PC insisted that forcing a player to draw nearly as many "bones" as they started with was unfair, and he didn't want to play a game that was inherently unfair.

I pointed out to him that I'd played the game long enough to know that the "unfairness" had a way of distributing itself so that quite likely in any game, most players would have a chance of getting stuck with a lot of extra dominoes. I hadn't ever seen anyone protest the unfairness of it before because it was a chance we were all willing to take. It didn't occur to me at the time to check to see if newer rules from some online site might suggest another option, but the other players and I agreed to a compromise that would at least reduce the damage if anybody had to draw more than a couple of bones.

He continued to protest, and I stupidly gave him the option to accept the rules or not play. He was thrilled; I'm not really sure whether his complaint was more against the unfairness of the game or the fact that he hadn't had a "fix" of the social networking sites that he surfs continually. He immediately jumped online and immersed himself in his internet world, ignoring the game and DD's sideways suggestions that he was welcome to join the fun—and the party in progress in their own apartment—at any time.

At one time he went to the kitchen to refresh his drink and knocked mine over on the way back. I grabbed a towel and started to sop up the spill, and he snapped into action to help me. As we went back to the kitchen to refill my glass, he said he was sorry, but he simply couldn't engage with a game that he found so terribly unfair.

But that's what life is, I said, and I meant it. While this game doesn't have the sure boundaries of the models he was using—the exact size and weight of the ball, size of the  playing field, or height of the goals in football or basketball, for example—what it does have is more of the flavor of a much bigger game: life.

The way I see it, in life as in chickenfoot, we don't all start off with exactly the same hand to play, and some of us, through no fault of our own, get stuck with situations that are more or less insurmountable along the way; some of us draw "good" hands that never send us to the "bone pile" (in this case, DD escaped the pile for the whole game), and some of us seem to go back to it repeatedly (the other three of us took some pretty big hits from it).

The "game" in life is coming through it with our sense of self-worth intact, and that depends on our ability to enjoy the game, whether we "win" or lose. And enjoy we did: the fourth player after PC quit was one of DD's college friends who is building a career as a comedian, and she has a sharp sense of funny; NOS's wit is enough to play off hers, and we found ourselves laughing frequently, even as the three of us dropped farther and farther behind DD's score. I lost—big time—but I really didn't care because I felt bad about the skirmish with PC and I had laughed so hard at the other two. For me, chickenfoot really doesn't have as much to do with winning and losing as it does with how you play the game.

The next morning I did go online in search of other rules, and I found a couple of suggestions that a player should draw only once before ending the turn, and that makes sense to me. (The rest of the rules on those sites didn't; they advised starting with so few dominoes per player that games could end with many dominoes left over, and having so many dominoes out of play would pretty much eliminate any kind of "strategy"). I like the rules my friends have played with that distribute most of the dominoes at the beginning of the game, but I could go along with limiting the number of draws.

But what interests me about the kerfuffle with PC is how it plays out with him off the game table. I didn't miss noting that his complaint about fairness followed hard on the heels of his draw that added probably four or five dominoes to  his hand, which cued my personal sense that political conservatives—and Texas conservatives in particular, I think—seem to have a propensity for crying foul when their personal "games" are affected by "the rules," but somewhat less so when their "rules" limit the "games" of others ("sanctity of marriage," "right to life, ""death penalty," and "socialized medicine").






One reason I'll be interested to see how this plays out with PC is that I wonder whether his sense of "fairness" extends to life in general. I was really interested to hear him talking with someone about his experience of living in California for the past several months and recognizing that Californians are somewhat more willing to tolerate people who are different from themselves; he seemed to see that as a positive, and he seemed to be okay with it.

And that's what interests me: If he really has adopted that attitude, if he really does believe in principles that we all deserve a fair chance and to be left alone to live our lives as we choose, then I will have a tremendous amount of respect for him. If, on the other hand, he limits the "fair playing field" to protecting himself and his beliefs at the expense of others, then maybe not so much.





I'll be interested to see how he plays at life.