I woke up to that less bright softer light coming in the small window in our little cottage bedroom and taps of rain on its glass panes and the roof above. David was sitting in his bed drawing on his sketch pad, noticing I was awake.
“It’s raining”, he said, “I don’t think we’re going to go to the beach. Are you going to run anyway?”
I swung out of bed and went to our window that looked out onto our big backyard through the blurring water on the window. The sky was gray and the grass and all the trees and bushes were all green and shiny with water.
I’d run every day since the first morning we’d been here, both to the beach and back. Yesterday was the first day I had done the whole mile run down Longnook Road, without having to walk even once. That felt REALLY good, in both my body AND my mind. Only big kids can run a WHOLE mile I figured!
I hadn’t thought to bring my raincoat on our trip and mom had let David and I pretty much decide what we wanted to bring, just wanting to make sure we brought a pair of long pants and and a long-sleeve shirt “with a collar” in case we wanted to go out to dinner at a “nice” restaurant.
“Nah”, I finally said to his running question, still peering out the window. It felt cozy to be in the cottage in the rain, with its different rooms and lots of windows looking outside.
“I wonder what the Kitzilla’s are doing?” David asked. That was the nickname we had given the cats of the woman that owned the place. David just LOVED playing with the cats. Sometimes he would follow them around the yard, and then when he stopped following them, they’d follow HIM around. They WERE pretty fun because they all liked to play, and the lady didn’t really play with them so they would always hang out with us. We’d poke them and box with them, though they all had sharp claws and could scratch our hands and arms up pretty good. Mine were kind of scratched up and David’s were REALLY scratched up.
“So what are you going to do?” David asked, “Read your book?”
“I don’t know”, I said, not really feeling interested in doing that today. I’d finished reading Doctor No and wasn’t quite ready to start Goldfinger. I’d seen that movie on TV. Was I just going to be bored? If I were back home I would set up and maybe play one of my Avalon Hill games, but I hadn’t thought to bring any with me. Damn!
But what if I could make one, I thought. Maybe a game like the Battle of the Bulge, because that was my favorite right now. David had all the colored markers. Both he and mom had all the sketch pads with paper I could use to make the map. We had that white cardboard pizza box from last night. The bottom was all greasy but the top was clean and I could cut it up and make units.
I imagined a valley between lots of hills with a big river running down it, like the Rhine or the Meuse. The attacking side, maybe the Germans, are trying to attack down the river valley to get to and capture the big port city at the other end where the big river meets the sea. The defending side, the Americans, are trying to keep that important port city from being captured and cutting their army in two. What would make it interesting was that the river would be hard to cross, except at maybe three or four bridges across it. Then the challenge, both attacking and defending, would be how much of your forces to keep on either side of the river, because it would be hard to get across it except at those two or three key bridges. I decided to call it the “Lonheim Gap”.
“I’m going to make my own wargame”, I said to David, knowing he’d be impressed, and he was.
“WHAA…”, he said, “You’re kidding!” I shook my head and smiled. That was exactly what I was hoping he would say. Yep, I thought, I had figured out how to run a mile, now I was going to figure out how to make my own wargame, with a map and units, basically using the rules from Battle of the Bulge and the game’s Combat Results Table that I really liked.
“I’m going to need four sheets from your sketch pad”, I said, turning from the window to look at him.
“I don’t know”, he said, looking at me, “You’re going to owe me!” He was always saying that these days when I asked him to do something for me. Like he could get me to do something for him sometimes when he wanted it, because I owed him, but he hadn’t asked me to do anything yet. I think maybe he just liked having his big brother owe him, like I wasn’t totally in charge all the time.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I said, nodding back at him. So he ripped off four sheets from his pad and gave them to me.
I took the sheets into the kitchen which had the best table to work on. I put them down next to each other and looked at them. I could tape them together, but how would I make the hexes on the board? Mom had brought a ruler, so I could measure out and draw a grid on each piece of paper. But that would only be a square grid, not hexagons, and all my Avalon Hill games, at least the ones that didn’t take place at sea, had hexagons. That had me worried that maybe I couldn’t do it.
We hadn’t heard anything from mom this morning, so we figured she was in her room. Maybe sleeping, but since we’d been here she was getting up really early, probably because we didn’t have a TV for her to stay up late and watch. So I walked through the bathroom to the door on the other side of it that went to her room. I knocked on the door and she said “come on in”.
She was sitting on HER bed drawing on her sketch pad just like David was. She also had that book she was now reading, “The Feminine Mystique”, whatever that was, next to her. Looking more like a kid than a grownup, she was wearing her big floppy Michigan sweatshirt, dark blue with yellow letters like mine, and then what looked like gray gym shorts and bare feet. Her hair looked messier than it usually did.
“How are you guys doing?” she asked, “Enjoying the rainy day? I sure am!” She turned her head back and forth to look out all her windows. She had SEVEN of them, as many as the whole rest of the house!
“We’re okay”, I said, “Can I borrow your ruler?”
“Sure”, she said, nodding, but now looking at what she was drawing on her sketch pad, but pointing at the desk across the room, “It’s on the desk.” I grabbed the ruler, said thanks, and left her room out the door to the bathroom I’d come in.
As I walked through the bathroom, I noticed that the counter around the sink had square tiles, but they weren’t put together in a square grid. They were put together like bricks, where each row of tiles were in a line, but the row above it was offset so each tile on that second row was above the space between the two tiles below. Even though they were still squares and not hexagons, each square had six squares next to it, so it really wasn’t any different than having hexagons. I got really excited. If I could figure out how to use the ruler to help me draw a brick pattern of squares on my four sheets of paper, I could make my board.
I returned to the big kitchen table and looked at my sheets of paper. David was still in our bedroom, drawing, and listening to side two of the Beatles “Rubber Soul” album, and I could still hear it pretty good in the kitchen, at least enough to hear the melody. I had heard the record at least a hundred times since “Santa” got it for David and I for Christmas, and I knew all the words enough to just hear them in my mind if not from the record player. It was a sad voice of one of the Beatles, though I couldn’t tell whether it was John, Paul or George that was singing. If RINGO sang, you could definitely tell it was him, but not this voice…
Is there anybody going to listen to my story
All about the girl who came to stay?
She's the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry
Still you don't regret a single dayAh, girl (breathing in)
Girl, girl
The sad words drifted through my mind as I started at the bottom of the piece of paper and put the ruler against each of the long sides and then marked every half inch…
When I think of all the times I've tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry
And she promises the earth to me and I believe her
After all this time I don't know whyAh, girl (breathing in)
Girl, girl
Luckily David’s pieces of that thicker drawing paper were only nine by twelve, so the ruler reached all the way across so I could trace lines every half inch the whole way across. Then that part of the song came where the other Beatles sang “tit tit tit” over and over in the background while the one singing the words sang that part where she was doing things he didn’t like…
She's the kind of girl who puts you down
When friends are there you feel a fool
When you say she's looking good
She acts as if it's understood she's cool
It was yet another girlfriend problems song. Seemed like half the songs we listened to were like that. So as I wondered why you would even have a girlfriend like that, I put marks every quarter of an inch on the shorter nine-inch edges, and he went back to his sad singing…
Was she told when she was young
That pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
I had figured out what to do to get my squares to look like the tiles in the bathroom. I had to draw each vertical line but only between every OTHER pair of horizontal lines it crossed. And then when I lined up the ruler to the next set of edge marks, a quarter-inch over, I had to draw THAT crossing line just between each two horizontal lines that I didn’t draw a line between before. That way I made squares, but arranged like bricks, like square hexagons.
While I did that, my favorite song on the record played. I liked it because it was louder and faster, like the guy singing had finally figured stuff out, and I sang along like I had finally figured stuff out too…
I'm looking through you, where did you go
I thought I knew you, what did I know
And then with the cool harmony…
You don't look different, but you have changed
I'm looking through you, you're not the same
It was one of those songs that didn’t have the chorus until after the second verse. A lot of songs had the chorus after EVERY verse, like that “Girl” one just before. That song on the first side, “Norwegian Wood”, didn’t really have a chorus at all and was more like just singing a poem.
As the words washed through my mind and I sang and swayed and bounced my heels to the beat, I made my pattern of square bricks on the piece of paper. When I was done I held it up and examined it carefully and it looked really good. It felt really good too, like I’d run a mile with my mind.
As the rest of the songs played on side two of the Rubber Soul album, I did the other three pieces of the thick paper the same way. That “Run For Your Life” song played at the end, except it was the Beatles singing it this time instead of Johnny Rivers. The words were nasty, but the tune was so snappy and cool that I couldn’t help but bounce my head and heals and sing along, and imagine how confident a guy must be so he could tell some girl, even his girlfriend, that he wouldn’t let her cheat on him…
You better run for your life if you can little girl
Hide your head in the sand little girl
Catch you with another man that’s the end
Little girl
I wondered if that’s how some kids were in junior high, or maybe regular high school.
When the song finished David put on our other new Beatles album, “Yesterday and Today”. I put together my four pieces of paper with the tiled squares on them and I was happy to see it worked out really well, the half squares on the right edge of the pieces of paper on the left side matched up with the half squares of the pieces of paper on the left edge of the right side to make whole squares. Though they were squares and not hexagons, they’d work just like hexagons with six others surrounding each one. And the edge between the two pieces on the bottom and the two on top worked just right too.
It was quiet for a minute in the bedroom while David put another album on the record player, the first side of our other new Beatles album, “Yesterday and Today”, that David got for his birthday and we’d listened to a bunch of times too. This album was interesting, because even though side two had the usual girlfriend problem songs, the ones on side one were different, mostly about other people or other stuff than girlfriend problems.
The first song was “Drive My Car”, which was kind of a girlfriend problem one, but different because it was about the movies and Hollywood, and the woman said she MIGHT be his girlfriend if he would be her driver and drive her around in her car. I guess if you’re a moviestar you’re supposed to have someone else drive you around and they should wear a uniform and one of those officer hats and maybe sunglasses…
Asked a girl what she wanted to be
She said, "Baby, can't you see?
I wanna be famous, a star of the screen
But you can do something in between""Baby, you can drive my car
Yes, I'm gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my car
And maybe I'll love you"
As I listened I realized that I hadn’t brought any Scotch Tape that I could use to put my map pieces together, but I searched around in the kitchen and found some masking tape in the big cupboard with a broom, dustpan and other cleaning stuff. So luckily, I was able to tape my four pieces of paper together that would make my gameboard. Once I had one big empty board of squares, now was the fun part, putting all the terrain on, but I needed David’s colored markers.
The song continued and the guy decides he will be her driver, I guess because he wants her to be his girlfriend. She’s happy that he’ll do it, but tells him she actually doesn’t have a car yet. That was the joke I guess, or what Stuart would say was the “kicker”…
I told that girl I could start right away
when she said, "Listen, babe, I got something to say
I got no car and it's breaking my heart
But I found a driver and that's a start"
I peeked in the door of our bedroom. David was sitting at the head of his bed with two pillows behind his back, his knees up to hold his sketch pad against his thighs as he drew. His pencil stopped moving and he looked at me.
“Yeeees?” he asked, drawing the word out like he was in charge.
“I need to borrow your markers”, I said, “The black one, blue one, brown one and green one.”
“What are you making?” he asked.
“A mapboard for the game I’m making”, I said. He nodded, thinking about that for a minute. The Beatle guy’s voice from the record player sounded like he was half asleep…
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Runnin' everywhere at such a speed
'Til they find there's no need (there's no need)
It was the perfect rainy day song, at least a rainy day when you were cozy indoors.
“Okay… but before you take any of them”, he said, like he was giving me instructions, “Make sure you draw everything in pencil before you color it in. If after you draw stuff you need to change it, you can erase the pencil but not the markers.” Like he knew better than I did and I was the stupid little kid. I had to say something.
“So”, I said, “My little brother is the big expert now?” He did a big smile.
“Your little brother”, he said, his eyes twinkling, “Does a lot of drawing and made that mistake many times. I don’t want you to mess something up and then want more of my paper.”
“Okay”, I said, nodding my head and making a silly face, “You weaseled your way out of that one pretty well… but watch yourself!”
“I always do”, he said nodding and his eyes still twinkling, finally turning his head from me and back to his drawing and said, “Oh… and you owe me… again!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I said back to him again and went back out to the kitchen to my gameboard with no terrain on it yet. I looked at it for a couple minutes and thought about what kind of terrain I wanted.
“Nowhere Man” was the next song on the album. It was a different sort of song for the Beatles because it wasn’t about them or some girlfriend, but some total other guy. Most songs had a chorus where you sang the same words each time, but in this one they were different…
Nowhere man, please listen
You don't know what you're missing
Nowhere man
The world is at your command
And in the second…
Nowhere man, don't worry
Take your time, don't hurry
Leave it all
'Til somebody else lends you a hand
Whenever I heard them sing that these days, I guess since mom and dad got divorced, it felt like they were singing it to me, like I was the nowhere man. It also made me think about mom, because she was always asking David and I to sing it. I mean I liked to sing, but not on COMMAND, from my MOM of all people.
“What’s mom up to?” I heard him ask from the bedroom. I guess it reminded David too.
“She’s in there sitting on her bed drawing something on her sketch pad”, I said, then realizing that was exactly what David was doing too.
I stared at my blank “board” of squares arranged like hexagons. I needed a river of course, because that was the main thing that went down the middle of the board and made the gap in the mountains. But should it be between hexes like in D-Day or in the middle of hexes like in Battle of the Bulge and Waterloo. My main river, the “Lonheim”, was going to be a big one, like the Rhine or the Mississippi, that you could only cross at the bridges. Then maybe there would be some little rivers coming off of it that you could cross like you did in Battle of the Bulge. So I decided to make them in the middle of the hex, like Battle of the Bulge.
Then I needed to decide whether to have mountain hexes, like D-Day and Battle of the Bulge, or ridges like Waterloo. The ridges looked kind of cool on the Waterloo board, so I decided to go with them. They worked kind of like rivers, except you were only doubled in defense if you were attacked from a ridge hex and you were on the top side of it, not the bottom side.
Forest hexes would be green, of course, and city hexes would have the criss-crossed black lines and the roads would be the double black lines.
The next song was another really different one for the Beatles, “Doctor Robert”, about some doctor guy, and I wondered if it was another “drug” song like “Along Comes Mary”, because that song talked about “my empty cup is as sweet as the punch”…
If you're down, he'll pick you up
Doctor Robert
Take a drink from his special cup
Doctor RobertHe's a man you must believe
Helping anyone in need
No one can succeed like
Doctor Robert
As I wondered about that I started to draw my map, in pencil as David suggested. I wanted the attackers to come from the top of the map down either side of the river and try to capture the big port city, Port Lonheim, on the sea at the end of the river at the bottom of the map.
First I drew the main river down a squiggly line of squares from the very top of the map down to the bottom where it went into the sea, which was at the very bottom of the map next to the bottom edge. The sea squares would be completely blue.
That “Yesterday” song was next with those sad lyrics that reminded me about before mom and dad divorced and felt like it was about me…
Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterdaySuddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday came suddenly
So trying not to think about all that too much, I drew the ridges, which were along both of the long sides of the board and made the hills on either side of the river valley, the river valley that was the “gap”. I made some smaller rivers that flowed from the ridges and hills on the sides of the board down to the big river. I did forests in different areas, most on the ridges, but even a few squares of forests here and there along the river. The music flowed through me as I worked with my pencil…
They're gonna put me in the movies
They're gonna make a big star out of me
We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely
And all I gotta do is act naturally
The Beatles guy singing this one sounded different. From reading the album cover it looked like it was Ringo singing. It was about Hollywood I figured, like “Drive My Car”, and kind of a silly song, but the ones Ringo sang usually were…
Well, I'll bet you I'm gonna be a big star
Might win an Oscar you can never tell
The movie's gonna make me a big star
'Cause I can play the part so well
It was kind of hard to see how all the terrain I’d penciled in worked together, because it was all just in pencil on the white sheets. But I was glad I did it that way because at one point I realized that I wanted a bigger river valley so I had to do some erasing and make a couple of my ridges not come so close to the big main river. Also I had a lot of fun making all the little rivers that flowed into the big one, so I made too many, and I ended up erasing some of them too…
Well, I hope you come to see me in the movie
Then I know that you will plainly see
The biggest fool that's ever hit the big time
And all I gotta do is act naturally
I felt like the guy in the song, at least the “biggest fool” part, but I kept working. Still doing everything in pencil, next I put in the cities. First the big port, “Port Lonheim”, at the bottom of the map where my big river came to the sea, which I did as three city squares because it was big, two on one side of the big river and the third on the other side, with a bridge crossing the river connecting them. Then I add two more smaller one-square cities up along the river, because that’s where cities usually were in the real world, at least on the real maps and gameboard maps I’d looked at. Then I added a couple more cities on the right side of the river up on the ridges, figuring the left side of the river, which had more forests, would be the countryside part.
There was quiet from our bedroom as David flipped the album to side two…
You tell me that you've got everything you want
And your bird can sing, but you don't get me
You don't get meYou say you've seen seven wonders
And your bird is green, but you can't see me
You can't see meWhen your prized possessions
Start to weigh you down
Look in my direction
I'll be 'round, I'll be 'round
This song was kind of like “Drive My Car”, I thought as I finished drawing my roads on my map, where he wanted her to be his girlfriend, but she was too busy worrying about something else, her pet bird in this case.
There was one road from the port city that ran along the right side of the river all the way up and off the top edge of the board and another from the port along the sea at the bottom edge of the map to the board edges. I figured my bridges across the big river would be where the cities were along the river, because that seemed to be the way it was in the real world. I put a lot of roads on the right side of the river, where the other cites up on ridges were, but only one on the left side of the board, the more countryside part.
So again I kind of looked at the whole penciled gameboard together, as I listened to the next song…
If I needed someone to love
You're the one that I'd be thinking of
If I needed someoneIf I had some more time to spend
Then I guess I'd be with you, my friend
If I needed someoneHad you come some other day
Then it might not have been like this
But you see now I'm too much in love
I thought about Molly, and wondered if I’d ever been “in love” with her or her with me. I didn’t think so, because we were best friends and none of the girlfriends the Beatles sang about sounded like they were THEIR best friends. They sounded more like their worst enemies.
I erased a few more things and made other changes that I thought made the map more interesting. The defenders would have more trouble reinforcing their units on the left side of the river because more of the roads were on the right side. But that would also be true for the attackers too. So a big challenge for both sides in the initial setup would be how many of their units to put on each side of the river, since there were only a few bridges across the river to help reinforce one side or the other. I figured I’d make the defenders set up first, so that the attackers would have the advantage of setting up second, like in Battle of the Bulge where the attacking Germans set up after the Americans.
It all looked pretty good, so as the music continued to flow through my mind I started using David’s markers to color in all my terrain…
We can work it out
We can work it out
I started to color in the rivers first, but I realized that I had to color in the roads and the bridges first to make the bridges look like they were on top of the rivers, not in them. Though the roads in the Battle of the Bulge and Waterloo games were double black lines, which looked really neat, they were a lot of work to draw so I did my roads like they did in the Afrika Korps game, except I did black lines instead of red ones. And then the harmony part…
Life is very short, and there’s no time
For fussing and fighting my friend
I’d heard people say, I guess really only grownups, that “life was short”, but for me, that just seemed so impossibly wrong. It felt like forever since as far back as I could remember being three, and I would still be an official kid for almost that long into the future. But still, “no time for fussing and fighting”, made me sad, thinking about mom and dad…
I have always thought that it's a crime
So I will ask you once again
I guess that was another feeling thing, like saying you wanted to “kill” somebody. I mean, fussing and fighting wasn’t REALLY a crime, at least the kind of fighting like arguments and stuff, but I got that it could FEEL like a crime.
I did all the ridges before I did the forests, because there were a couple places where I wanted forests on the same square where there was a ridge. And finally the cities, I did those with David’s special black marker that made a very thin line, drawing a little grid in each city square. When it was done it looked pretty good, though the four pieces of paper taped together didn’t lie completely flat like the board of my games did, but good enough I figured.
So next was making the units. The units for my Avalon Hill games were made out of thick cardboard, and all their symbols and numbers were printed in black on a shiny colored surface, either pink, blue or green. In my World War Two games the Germans were usually pink and the Allies blue. In my Napoleon game the French were blue, the British pink and the Prussians, which were the Germans back then, were green.
The next song was a Ringo one. They always sounded different. Growlier…
What goes on in your heart?
What goes on in your mind?
You are tearing me apart
When you treat me so unkind
What goes on in your mind?
“Tearing me apart”. Not for real, but another feeling thing. And then there was this…
It's so easy for a girl like you to li
Tell me why
Yeah. I wanted to know too why it would be easy for a girl to lie, and a girl like what? One that was super pretty? That all the boys wanted to be their girlfriend? There was that “Cherish” song by the Association that I told dad about and he liked, where they talked about boys lying to girls they wanted to be their girlfriend…
I could say I need you but then you'd realize
That I want you just like a thousand other guys
Who'd say they loved you with all the rest of their lies
All this boyfriend girlfriend and “love” stuff. It all seemed so complicated. I wondered if all this kind of stuff was going to happen in junior high at Tappan, as I pulled the pizza box from last night out of the trash can in the kitchen, that I would use to make my units.
Then it was the last song on the record, “Daytripper”, both David and my favorite, with that great “der der der” guitar part at the beginning…
She was a day tripper
One way ticket, yeah
It took me so long to find out
And I found outTried to please her
She only played one night stands
Tried to please her
She only played one night stands, now
I mean David and I had no idea what a “day tripper” really was, and what a “one night stand” was. It made sense that he couldn’t trust her, like mom said she couldn’t trust dad anymore. So it was another one of those many Beatles girlfriend problems songs. David and I sometimes added a silly line at the end…
She was a day tripper
Sunday driver, yeah
It took me so long to find out
And I found out
I threw her out!
I finally checked out the pizza box from last night. It was made out of a shiny white cardboard that was thicker than paper but not super thick. It would have been better if it were just a bit more thick, like the cardboard for the units in my real games, but after searching around more, I figured that was the best I was going to do. The bottom of the pizza box was all oily and dirty from the pizza, but the top part was mostly okay. And luckily, the drawer in the kitchen with all the forks, spoons and knives had a pair of scissors in it too that could cut the cardboard.
So I cut out a big rectangle of cardboard from the top of the box and then drew a grid on it with a pencil so the lines were a half inch apart, the size of the squares on my gameboard. Then I would have to draw in each square a smaller rectangle where I’d put the symbol for that kind of unit, either, the “X” for infantry, the oval for armor, and the “X” over the oval for armored infantry.
There was a pause in the music. I thought for a while about whether to do parachute, cavalry, and headquarters units. The allies parachute units were pretty cool in the D-Day game, because you could parachute them behind the German lines. The Americans had lots of parachute units in Battle of the Bulge, but they didn’t actually parachute. So I decided not to have any of those. The Germans and Russians in Stalingrad had cavalry units, but they weren’t really different from infantry and armor, and couldn’t do anything special, so I decided not to make any of those. And in most of the games, if they even had headquarter units, they had zero combat factors so they were kind of worthless and stupid. In a real war they were super important because that was where the generals were who ran things. In D-Day, though they had an attack factor of “0”, at least they had a defense factor of “1” and they had a zone of control, so they weren’t totally worthless. But since that was where the generals were I decided to have them in my game.
Then I heard that very familiar music again from the record player…
You tell me that you've got everything you want
And your bird can sing, but you don't get me
You don't get me
David was playing side two of “Yesterday and Today” again. That was definitely his favorite side of the record. For me it was more fifty-fifty. I agreed “Day Tripper" was the best song, but side one had “Drive My Car” and “I’m Only Sleeping”, both I liked, particularly on a rainy day like this one.
Under the rectangle with the symbol on each unit, I’d put the numbers for the attack, defense and movement factors with a dash between each. Since all my units were going to be white, I’d have to use different colored markers to draw the box with the symbol and the factors for each unit below it. But when I used David’s red marker to try to do the box, symbol and factors for the first unit I realized that the line it made was too thick and I couldn’t fit the three numbers with dashes between them in the little half-inch square. So I ended up using red and blue pens instead, which worked better, but it was still hard to get the three factor numbers - attack, defense and movement - all in a line with dashes between them under the box with the symbol in those half-inch units. So I ended up just having a single combat factor, the same for attacking and defending like in Battle of the Bulge, so that worked better only having to put TWO numbers and ONE dash on each unit.
The words of the songs I now knew by heart went through my mind without me hardly even noticing them, except once in a while when some words poked at feelings inside me…
Nowhere man, please listen
You don't know what you're missingSuddenly
I'm not half the man I used to beIt's so easy for a girl like you to lie
Tell me why
I used David’s blue pen to make the American units. Mostly infantry, but some armor and armored infantry too. I used his red pen to make the German units. Twice as many as the Americans, since they were attacking. I made the German units half infantry, and the other half armored infantry and armor, because they were the attackers and that’s the way it was in Battle of the Bulge. I made the American units mostly infantry. When I had written all the symbols and factors in red or blue pen in all the squares on my cardboard grid, I used the scissors to cut the units up into their individual little squares.
Then I made my combat results table on a regular piece of plain white paper. I drew a grid again with the ruler and a black pen, but did the lines three-quarters of an inch apart, seven lines across and twelve down to make a grid with 66 boxes. To the left of each row I put the numbers, “1” through “6” for the different dice rolls. On top of each column I put the odds, “1 to 6”, “1 to 5”, “1 to 4”, all the way to “6 to 1”. I decided to use the Battle of the Bulge results table because it didn’t have so many dice rolls where all the units got eliminated on one side or the other. I couldn’t remember ALL the results but knew most of them and could figure out what the others should be given where the ones I remembered were in the grid.
I had been working all morning as the rain kept falling outside, and I was getting hungry for lunch, so I made myself a baloney and cheese sandwich with mustard. As I ate it I looked at my completed table and realized that I didn’t have any dice! How could I play my game without one? Such a stupid little thing to mess up all my work!
I was surprised when I heard the door between the bathroom and mom’s bedroom open and she came through the bathroom into the kitchen. She looked at me with my mouth full of food chewing and grinned.
“What are they serving for lunch?” she asked, like we were at some restaurant or something. With my mouth still full of half chewed food, I mumbled what was in the sandwich I had made for myself.
Still grinning, she nodded and said, “I’d love one of those… and some chips and a Tab.” She didn’t even tell me not to talk with food in my mouth.
I looked at her like I wasn’t sure if she really meant that or she was just joking. I mean I’d made sandwiches before for a picnic and she ate one, but I couldn’t remember her ever asking me to make a sandwich specially for her.
“You want me to make you a sandwich?” I asked.
“If you’re offering”, she said, her eyes twinkling.
“I guess so”, I said, still not sure this was really happening.
“Thanks!” she said, then looking at my game board and units on the kitchen table asked, “What’s all this?”
“I made my own wargame”, I said, like it really wasn’t a big deal even though I thought it really was and hoped she would think so too, even though I was still feeling like I messed up by not making the squares on the board big enough. She looked at it closer.
“Wow”, she said, “That’s really impressive, Coolie!” Yeah, I thought, if only I’d made my squares bigger.
“What inspired you to do that?” she asked.
“I don’t know”, I said, even though I DID know, “I was bored and felt like playing one of my games, but I didn’t bring any so I decided to make one.”
“Well”, she said, “Maybe you’ll grow up and become a top game designer, get rich, and buy your dear old mom a cottage of her own on the Cape!”
“Yeah maybe”, I said, not unhappy at the idea that I was a good game designer, “But I need a dice to play the game, and since we didn’t bring any games, I don’t have one!”
“Hmmm”, she said, thinking, “Why don’t you put pieces of paper with the numbers one to six written on them into a cup and then pull one out each time you want to roll the dice.”
I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that, though picking a piece of paper out of a cup wasn’t nearly as cool as rolling a dice.
“There you go, problem solved”, she said, making her biggest smile, “I just earned my sandwich. Now let’s work on world peace!”
David had come out of our bedroom and looked at her like she was some strange alien being.
She looked back at him and said, “Hey Mister D!”
“You’ve been in your room all morning”, he said, like he couldn’t figure out why.
“I know”, she said, her eyebrow raising and her eyes twinkling, “I’m enjoying just lounging around on my bed in my big gorgeous yet cozy bedroom enjoying the rainy day. Reading my book, doing some sketching, but mostly a whole lot of nothing.” She laughed. That was good to hear and I hadn’t heard her laugh like that in a long time. It was when she talked without laughing or smiling that I would get worried.
She pointed at me and said, “I’ll be ready for my lunch whenever it’s ready!” She pointed behind her and said, “I’ll be in my room! Thanks!” She turned around, blew David a kiss, and then walked back through the bathroom and through the doorway to her room on the other side and closed it behind her.
David looked at me, worried, and said, “Mom’s acting strange. Is she okay?”
“I think so”, I said, “For the first time in a long time.” He shook his head like it didn’t make sense.
But then he grinned and said, “I’ll have a baloney and cheese sandwich too, but no mustard… and a Tab.” I looked at him like what was he talking about.
“You owe me”, he said.
“Maybe so, but you didn’t even ask”, I said, “You deserve a spanking for that!”
“I know”, he said, turning around and going back in our bedroom.
Sometimes when I was bored and felt like it, I would wrestle David to the ground on his stomach, sit on his back and pretend spank him. I mean I really spanked him, but he knew it was for fun, I wasn’t REALLY mad at him. I would say that it was for all the bad things he did that I wasn’t there to see, which was kind of stupid when you thought about it, just a really bad excuse to spank someone. But he seemed to actually like it for some reason, and I liked it too. From listening to our Smothers Brothers records so much, we both knew what sibling rivalry was, and how they made fun of it. So we liked to make fun of our’s too. And since we were just doing it to be silly, I could tell him things I was really feeling and pretend like I was just making stuff up to spank him.
I made David his sandwich first and put it on a plate. Then I called out to him that it was ready.
“You’re not going to bring it to me?” he called back from our bedroom. I laughed through my nose.
“I don’t owe you THAT much”, I said.
“Okay, okay”, he said, and came back out in the kitchen and took the plate, got a Tab from the refrigerator, and headed back towards our bedroom.
“You’re not going to say thank you?” I asked.
As he continued to walk away not looking at me he shook his head and said, “You owed me.”
Then I made mom her sandwich, put it on a plate with a little bag of potato chips, got her a Tab from the fridge and took it to her in her room. She was sitting on her big bed again just like she did at home with her back against the wall and her knees up, drawing on her sketch pad, just like David did when HE sat on his bed and drew.
“Ahh thanks, Coolie, you’re a sweetie”, she said, “Are you guys enjoying this rainy day as much as I am?” I nodded.
“It’s nice to be cozy inside”, I said.
“IT IS”, she said, her eyes twinkling at me, “I’m just happy to have nothing that I HAVE to do. There’s plenty of stuff to sort out when we get home, but while we’re here I can’t really do anything about it so why kill myself worrying about it until then, right?”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked. Now that I was a big kid, maybe I should know about that kind of stuff.
She blew air out of her mouth and said, “Well for instance, I’m trying to open my own bank account at our bank, but so far, they’re saying I have to have your father cosign, even though we’re not married anymore. I’m a grown woman and I’ve never bounced a check in my life, but I can’t have my own damn bank account without your father’s signature and having access to it too?” I looked at her but didn’t know what to say.
“And friends of your father and mine in the academic world”, she said, “As soon as they find out that we’re divorced, they stop inviting me to their parties. We worked hard to be part of that community, that’s one of the reasons we moved to Burns Park, because that’s where many of them lived. But now I feel like I’m being shunned, it’s awful.” I still didn’t know what to say. There was so much I didn’t know about, that was making me feel more like a stupid kid again.
“And your father…” she said, but stopped before she finished the sentence and looked into my eyes and said, “I’m sensing you don’t like it when I refer to your dad as ‘your father’.”
She was right, I really DIDN’T like it, but I would never tell her something like that. I never wanted to say anything to her where we might get into a fight. I had seen and heard her fight with dad too many times, and I always hated it, like we were one of those broken families! She looked into my eyes and nodded slowly, like she could tell that was what I was thinking.
“I’m sorry sweetie”, she said, “Though he’s not my husband anymore he’s still your dad, and I’m your mom, and the two of us are still your parents. So when I refer to him, I’ll do my best to call him ‘your dad’ and not ‘your father’, okay?” I nodded, but felt like a little kid. When you talked to mom she just took over sometimes.
I pointed to the bathroom door behind me and said, “I want to get back to working on my game.” She nodded, and for once didn’t say anything. I walked into the bathroom and shut the door to her room and went back to my game on the kitchen table.
So I sat down at the table to play my game, even though I was still thinking about what mom had said. The things mom had to worry about sounded BAD. I mean me and the other kids my age would get older but we would never be grownups like mom and dad were, we would be completely different. I wasn’t sure HOW we’d be different, but we would somehow. And the way the way older kids that played music and sang songs, like the Beatles, the Association, Johnny Rivers, the Supremes, the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson, they had all KINDS of problems too that they sang about. Problems with girlfriends and boyfriends, problems with being in love, and worrying that your girlfriend would cheat on you. It all seemed so much more complicated than just having friends, good friends like Mike and Molly, if she still really was my friend anymore, I wondered.
Starting to put the American units on my gameboard to set up their defense, I realized that I had made a big mistake. My units were the same size as the squares on my board, so each covered the entire square so you couldn’t see what the square’s terrain was under the unit. And when I set up units on squares next to each other they got all pushed together and bumped into the units next to them making it look kind of messy. If I could do it over again I would have made the squares bigger, maybe like three-quarters of an inch, instead of half-inch like the units, but I’d done too much work already on my board, and I didn’t think David would give me four more pieces of his paper.
So I tried to stop thinking about all that other stuff, and thinking about my game instead, though I was still mad about not making my mapboard squares bigger. I set up the defending blue American units, maybe a little more than half of them on the right side of the river that had most of the cities and the main road along the river. When you’re the defender, you try to set as many of your units up as possible in places where their combat factor gets doubled on defense, like in cities, on top of ridges, in forests, or behind rivers.
Setting up the best possible defense was the part of my real wargames at home that I usually liked the best, imagining I was the general staring at the map and telling all my unit commanders where they should be defending and why. Even if I was setting up the badguy Germans, like in D-Day, it was still fun.
In the middle of my defensive position was the big river you couldn’t move across or attack across, except across its bridges, and there were only four along its whole length. One at the top of the board along a road that the Germans controlled. One at the bottom of the board at the big port city, “Port Lonheim”, along the sea coast. And two in between, by the cities of “Chalkburg” and “Feldstein”, currently both controlled by the Americans. They would want to keep control of those two bridges as long as possible to make it easier to move units from one side to the other of the big river.
I had made about half as many units for the Americans as the Germans, but when I’d set up all those units, I realized that they didn’t have enough to cover their whole front line. So I made some more, mostly infantry, and put those on the board so I had what seemed like an okay defense. I looked at my setup, and figured maybe I needed a couple more units protecting that first bridge south of the front line at Chalkburg, but I wasn’t sure where I could take them from without weakening other positions along the line. I made some final changes and decided I was done.
Then I became the German general. I looked again at where all the American units were placed, and tried to figure out what was the weak point, if any, in their defense. My first thought was to put almost all the German units on one side of the big river and just enough on the other side to hold that part of the front line. But then I figured, like in Battle of the Bulge, I should attack weak points on BOTH sides, and adjust my overall attack plan depending on how those attacks went. Then I would focus on both sides of the river on trying to capture that first bridge south of the front line. So I spent more than an hour figuring out where and setting up the German units until I finally had what seemed like the best possible attack.
So the Germans moved first and I continued to play the game for the next couple hours, making more units for each side as reinforcements when they needed them. The Germans had taken Chalkburg and finally Feldstein too, and with what they had left of their army, got close enough to Port Lonheim to launch an attack on the city. I picked a “1” from the cup for my dice roll, which was the worst roll, and they had to all retreat two squares. Since the defender got to say where they retreated to, they got retreated in a way that made a hole in their line. Then it was the American’s turn and they moved through that hole and surrounded and attacked some of the big German armor units that had led the attack on Port Lonheim. A good dice roll, forcing the surroundedGerman armor units to retreat, would destroy them and probably save the port city which was the key to winning the game.
But I picked the “1” AGAIN from the cup, and all the Americans that attacked the German armor units, which included the ones defending Port Lonheim had to retreat. The Americans had to retreat out of the port. The Germans were probably going to win.
I didn’t want it to end that way, so I put the “1” back in the cup, shook it, and picked another number. That one was “4”, which meant the Germans had to retreat, which they couldn’t because they were surrounded, so they were eliminated. If I had been playing against somebody else, it would have been cheating, but since it was just me, I could do whatever I wanted, and make the story come out the way that I wanted it to.