Monopoly

To say that Wade always won at Monopoly is an understatement.  Wade had a Monopoly on Monopoly.  (And yes, it took me hours to think of that).   I think that Wade is the primary reason I am now the conservative saver that I am.  And for that, I thank him.

For some background, we were limited in what were allowed to do on Sundays, though we were always looking for ways we could bend the rules!  Since we would never have played together by choice, we were forced to think of things we could do to make the hours go by.  In the early years, board games were often employed, and one of our favorite games to play was Monopoly, since it didn't seem to require that much strategy (not like Risk, anyway) and even Krissy could play (and lose) it with us.

This is how it went:  Wade was always the banker.  He wanted to be the banker, he had little patience with us counting and distributing and I think he generally enjoyed being close to the money.  He also had some "house rules" to just about every game that seemed to help him more than the rest of us.  One of the house rules for Monopoly was that you had the ability to go into debt.  Lots of debt.

If I didn't know better, I would think that one of the other house rules was that Wade always started out the game owning Boardwalk and Park Place.  But that was not a rule, that was manipulation and strategy on his part.  He was always able to get the properties he wanted from us...we wanted to please him, and he would explain to us in vivid detail why owning two of the light blue ones was SO much better than owning one of the purple ones, in the long run.  It was up to us, but that's what he would do.  Since he always won, (and was clearly better at this game than we were), we took his sage advice!

As it happened, we would play for hours, accumulating thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars in monopoly debt.  If we were lucky, Wade would land on our scraps of land and subtract a couple of hundred from the total.  More likely, though, he would land on "Free Parking" and collect the pile of money from the middle with a wicked grin. I always thought that this time around the board, maybe I would get lucky.  This time, I wouldn't land on the purples or the greens (he usually ended up with them both).  The whole last quadrant was murder, with only the community chest, chance or the railroad to save you.  By the end, he usually owned the railroads, too.  The games were endless.  We would play for days and days.  The board would sit, undisturbed, with the tablet of debt next to the bank.  We would play until we gave up.

That game taught me a lot about gambling and debt.  That feeling of treading water, of never being able to get a handle on your own game, of not seeing a bigger picture must be how many indebted people feel.  I know it may not have been your intention to teach me so much, but thank you, anyway, Wade!