Boggle: A True Story

I swear to you, every word of this story is true. I wish it weren't, but it is.

In the spring of 2005, I found myself assigned to work on an EPA-monitored Superfund clean-up site. For those of you unfamiliar with the EPA's Superfund sites, these are basically really nasty places where some company dumped assloads of pollutants for decades upon decades, creating such an unholy mess that it could never be cleaned up properly without the Federal Government's intervention.

They're pretty disgusting.

To make matters worse, the particular Superfund site I was assigned to at the time was located in West Virginia, on the banks of the Ohio River, just south of the thriving metropolis of Wheeling, in a little town called Moundsville. So on top of cleaning up mountains of festering chemicals while wearing a TYVEC suit with air hoses supplying my air for breathing, I was also living in one of the most depressing places in the entire country.

Everything was grey. All the time. The sky was grey, the air was grey, the ground was grey, the river was grey, the skin color of the local residents- everything. My entire world had become grey.

Around this time, God saw fit to balance out my grey, dour existence with a little ray of sunshine. It came in the form of a girl I met through some singles website, who lived about 45 minutes away, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was Valerie, a gorgeous blonde who looked like a cross between Kylie Minogue and Marilyn Monroe.

Now I could go on and on about Valerie. She was unlike anyone I had ever met. She was perennially cheerful, without the least hint of that annoying bubbly chirpiness that most cheerful people have. She had a positive disposition, no matter what the situation or circumstances. Most of all, she was full of great ideas on every topic-where to go, what to see, what to do once we got there.

On top of just being good company, Valerie also opened my eyes to several aspects of existence that, until then, hadn't yet presented themselves to me. While I could list pages and pages of the areas where she enlightened me- not least of which was, the undiscovered beauty of Pittsburgh itself- I think the biggest eye-opener of all wasn't something she necessarily DID, but rather what she WAS.

See, while Valerie and I were roughly the same age- she was just a couple of years older than me- Valerie had gotten started on the whole family-rearing endeavor far earlier than I had. So while my oldest kid at the time was about 8 years old, Valerie's was 17. She was the parent of a teenager!

I had no experience dating a woman with a teenager. And to be frank, before I met her daughter, I expected the worst. But Valerie's girl was a very pleasant surprise, as was her 11-year-old son.

Both of them were the nicest, sweetest, most polite kids I could have ever dreamed of meeting. We brought them along with us every so often when we went out to hit the town or get dinner, and they were always fun to have along, and nearly always on their best behavior. They even called me "Mr. Steve", which amused me to no end, but which I never corrected, since it indicated to me that Valerie was raising them with the proper level of respect for their elders, and I didn't want to be an impediment to that.

Naturally, since I was around such a great woman and such wonderful kids, I, too, always wanted to put my best foot forward all the time. I didn't want them to get any indication that I could be anything less than dignified and mature in every situation.

It was in that frame of mind that I found myself one night at Valerie's house, enjoying a delicious meal she had cooked up for me, and chatting with her and her daughter. Time was wasting, and Valerie liked the stay occupied, so she suggested we all play a game of Boggle.

Boggle, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a fairly simple game. Here's how it's explained by Wikipedia:

"The game begins by shaking a covered tray of sixteen cubic dice. Each die has a different letter printed on each of its sides. The dice settle into a four by four tray so that only the top letter of each cube is visible. After they have settled into the grid, a three-minute timer is started and all players simultaneously begin the main phase of play.

Each player searches for words that can be constructed from the letters of sequentially adjacent cubes, where "adjacent" cubes are those horizontally, vertically or diagonally neighboring. Words may include singular and plural (or other derived forms) separately, but may not use the same letter cube more than once per word. Each player records all the words he or she finds by writing on a private sheet of paper. After three minutes have elapsed, all players must stop writing and the game enters the scoring phase."

Simple enough, right?

So we broke out the Boggle.

Valerie's daughter shook it up and set it down. Valerie started the timer. And we were off!

And there it was, right in front of me, across the bottom row of the tray:

V. U. L. V. and on the next row, above the last V... A.

VULVA.

Staring me right in the face.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. No, no, no, Steve, NOT GOOD. You can't write down "VULVA" in front of your girlfriend and her teenage daughter, not even if it IS a proper medical term. No, find something else.

But it was fruitless at that point. As any red-blooded male out there can attest to, once you've seen Vulva, it's ALL you can see.

I looked desperately around the board for something else. For ANYTHING else. Maybe an "I" next to an "S". Nope. Or possibly an "A" next to an "N"- but no, that wasn't to be found anywhere, either.

All of those tiny, 2 or 3 letter words that pop up EVERY SINGLE TIME you play Boggle were NOT THERE THIS TIME.

The best I could do was locate an "S"- next to the final "A" in Vulva. "Great," I thought with dismay as I watched the timer tick down to nothing, "Multiple Vulvas. These two are going to think I'm the biggest pervert on the face of the planet."

Finally, the last few seconds ticked away. I was stuck- I had no other options. Picking up my pad to hide my shame, I scratched "VULVAS" onto the top sheet of paper. And as a good faith measure to show I wasn't just looking for porn words, I also wrote down "AS."

There. I was covered.

Valerie went first, and rattled off an impressive list of words I never saw. "Why"- who knew that was there? Or "Gas". Not bad. She had 6 or 7 of these on her pad.

Her daughter was next, and she rattled off an equally impressive list of words. She and Valerie added up their scores and wrote them down, and then they both turned and looked at me.

"Ok, Mr. Steve, what do you have?" her daughter asked.

"Um... well, I spotted this one right off," I said as I slowly lay my pad down on the table, "and it's- you know, it's a medical term... it's in Grey's Anatomy... and it was right there, so I uh..."

"Oh hey, look, you're right," Valerie said, pointing to the tray with nothing more than mild admiration in her voice.

"Oh yeah!" her daughter said, spotting it too. "V-U-L-V-A-S. Hey, not bad, Mr. Steve!"

"Yeah, that's 6 letters," Valerie said, "which is 3 points. Pretty good!"

"Um.... I also have 'AS'...." I offered lamely, dumbfounded.

I was in utter shock. I had just written down female privates, right in front of them, and they didn't even blink. Didn't snicker, didn't shake their heads in disgust, didn't even seem to notice what it meant. They had attained a level of maturity in their household that I was still above me, no matter how much I pretended.

Valerie picked up the tray and shook it to begin our next round.

And I spent the rest of the evening looking for more dirty words, knowing that from now on I had free reign to do so.

I didn't find any though. Just Vulva, just that one time.