Victor loves words … word jumbles, crossword puzzles and especially Boggle, a game where you make words by connecting all the letters on the little cubes.

Despite being a word master there is one game that terrifies Victor. It’s the biggest and most important word game of all – Scrabble. When playing Scrabble, he can find plenty of places to build on existing words. But then, when he finally picks all the right letters for the big one - a 7-letter word that could earn him 50 bonus points, there’s no place on the board for it … no place at all, because by this point in the game, the board is all crowded up with letters, words all over the place. It’s a state of complete and utter chaos.

But, you know, it’s kind of a nice word, so he holds onto it for awhile, even passing up turns in hopes that he might find some place to put those seven tiles down and earn that 50-point reward. But in the end, no space opens up. There’s simply no room and the tiles are slid off the rack and returned to the brown bag from which they magically emerged.

Scrabble is such an emotionally exhausting game sometimes … That’s why Victor typically resigns himself to word jumbles and crossword puzzles. They’re much easier to solve. … And Victor, when it comes right down to it, likes to stick to what he does best. It’s what we all do really, isn’t it? We dream of magical things such as writing a novel, growing the perfect garden, moving to a faraway place or just somehow making one small but significant mark in this world, but when we seriously consider the difficulty of achieving such dreams – it's much like trying to squeeze a big word onto our overcrowded board and it feels too hard so we just stop searching for a place to put all that.

In the end, we throw the letters back into the bag and return to the warm and comfortable place where we feel most secure ... because seven-letter words are fun to think about, but seriously hard to accommodate …. Especially when the board’s all crowded up with the words that have already been put down. It’s not like you can just move them all out of the way and put a new one there. That would be against the official rules of Scrabble.

For those who struggle with breaking the rules, Scrabble’s a very risky game. It’s not for the faint of heart, even when you get all the right letters … especially then.

It’s a hard game for those little letter tiles too. If you don’t believe it, just ask the letter Z, or her freakish buds X, Q and K. Well, actually it’s not that hard for K, ‘cause K knows how to fit in a little better, and you can tell that because she's valued at 5 points, whereas Z, X and Q are considerably more. Apparently, the more unique and harder to accommodate you are, the higher the assigned point value.

Somehow, that all makes sense to me, and given the friends I have … I consider myself a high roller, ‘cause even though I may be breaking official rules by just coming right out and saying this, they’re all worth at least 10 points. And some, a little more. So all things considered, I guess I’m fortunate…. Because even if I can’t find the right letters to make them into words and even if they wind up costing me points, I’m OK being stuck with every last one of them.

Writer’s note: I would like to thank my friends Q, X, K, and also the letter J, who frequently goes unrecognized, for their unknowing yet thoughtful contributions to this soul-searching if somewhat mushy post.

Victor is in the ladies room at Total Wine in the Harbor Shops off Cordova Road ... in the right hand upper drawer of the only cabinet in there. I hope he gets found .... The restroom is not in the most obvious spot there. So here's the guide: Walk in, go all the way to the left and then proceed to the back of the store .... left on aisle 7, and keep going until you see it on the right.