The answer for Keith and I is apparently not...
We decided to play a new board game last night here in the day room of the Neuro unit. They stock quite the variety of fun games and activities with which visitors can occupy themselves. Wednesday night we played Scrabble, one of Keith and my favorites. We usually play without controversy, and always without keeping score (Does that make it Socialist Scrabble? Discuss amongst yourselves...). Last night we decided to put our expansive California public elementary school education to the test and play a game that involved identifying states on a US map and, if you really want a challenge, identifying the capital of the state. Needless to say we made sure the day room was empty before we began so that there would be no witnesses to the humiliation we were anticipating.
We opened up the board that was just a map of the United States with each state labeled with a random number 1-50. There was a spinner whose arrow would point to 1-50, a cheat sheet with which state corresponds to each 1-50 number and its Capital, and dice for moving your marker around the perimeter of the board. And away we went.
Almost from the first spin of the arrow we were in trouble - and we were just trying to identify the location of the states! We didn't undertake the naming of the states AND capitals until our next game! We learned immediately that the northeastern seaboard is a problem. Too many states, too small an area and no symmetry. Who designed that nightmare anyway? I do believe that every state up there was identified as New York on one spin or another. Pretty soon every state in the Union was deemed New York on first glance before any serious attempt was made to identify it. The southern gulf states would have been a mystery had they not been covered in oil sludge and by the news media within the past 6 months. I am convinced that I was never taught the mid west states in elementary school due to a California bias and conspiracy probably stemming from language hidden deep in the Farm Bill. Western states, while few and spacious, could only be named if entered or exited during some memorable (and not always in a good way) car vacation taken during childhood. And did anyone else notice that as soon as they moved the back seats of the car farther away than dad's arm length from the front, they had to start putting in DVD players, cup holders and electric shock equipped seats? Again, discuss amongst yourselves...
I did the best I could to drag state location knowledge from my grey matter and didn't even play the "but I just had brain surgery" card. I got states like Arkansas (thanks to Carter and Jen), South Dakota, Alabama, Oklahoma and a few others much to my surprise. And there were some that I just knew. Of course I also blankly stared at New Mexico completely mystified as I did with Massachusetts, New Hampshire (yes, as a matter of fact we did live up there for a time...), Delaware, and Montana. Keith beat me around the board on which state was which, although he got mired in the northeastern seaboard at one point and almost didn't get out. That was about the time that every state became New York and we were laughing so hard we were crying. Milk coming out of the nose laughing. Disrupt the whole Neuro ward laughing. Stress relieving laughing.
I did much better when we moved on to identifying not only the state but the capital. I could remember most of the state locations from the first game (technically is that cheating or having a good memory??) and somehow I have retained some of Mr. Schaeffer's 6th grade drilling of state capitals. "No, Billingsly is the actress that played the Beaver's mother, not the capital of Montana." "Yes, Arkansas does have a capital." "I swear, Pierre IS the capital of South Dakota."
Bottom line here is that we needed a good laugh and we got it. Keith and I may not be able to identify where we are on a map, especially if we're anywhere on the northeastern seaboard whether we've lived there or not. But we proved for the millionth time during our 17 year marriage that we can laugh our asses off in the face of anything. Adversity, stress, peeing in a jug, no matter what it is. Laughter makes it all bearable. That and a good map...
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