WRITE CLUB: MATCH

Write Club is a monthly, literary bloodsport in which contenders face off against each other with 7-minute essays on competing topics. Below was my combatant essay based on the prompt “MATCH,” facing off against “MIX.” This essay was performed on March 19, 2024, at The GMan Tavern in Chicago. It was defeated in its bout.

The tiles are square and made of cardboard, arranged in a nine-by-eight grid on a knee-high coffee table. On the back of every tile is a scattered red-and-white pattern that will one day remind you of tests for color blindness. On the front, currently face-down, are 72 line drawings of 36 different random images: A rose, a banana, a baby carriage, a pair of owls, a 19th-century rollerskate. This is Milton Bradley’s original printing of Memory, a game for ages 4-8, in which players take turns flipping over two tiles at a time in an attempt to find two identical images.

For most children in the early 1980s, I wager, this was an amusing diversion, a way to pass the time while one waited for dinner to be prepared or for an episode of The A-Team to start. But I am a strange child on several levels, the only non-white student at my grade level in my single-school suburban district, disappearing into the stacks of the local library for hours at a time, a child for whom every detail seems significant. For me, Milton Bradley’s game of Memory is an identity-forging activity that introduces me to concepts such as careful deduction and a deep, foreboding sense that my perceptions of reality cannot ever be fully trusted. To my 4-8 year-old self, the 72 cardboard tiles of Milton Bradley’s Memory are the first cobblestones on my road to anxiety, perfectionism, and social awkwardness.

You know: Being “gifted.”

Because Memory is not a game such as chess or euchre, the kind of contest in which you can develop an actual strategy or skill in order to consistently win at it. For the first few turns of the game it’s unreasonable to call it Memory at all, when it’s more accurately a game of Wild Stabbing, except there are multiple reasons you shouldn’t sell children a game called Wild Stabbing. Over the course of the game, you learn a simple truth: To succeed, you must remember how to find a match.

You grow older. You learn other truths. Among these truths is the revelation that not everything that matches is identical. There are matches that are little alike each other, that are complementary, like the edges of puzzle pieces or microscopic strands of protein. There are matches that stand in direct opposition to each other, that are of equal quality or talent that make their match particularly compelling to observe. Federer vs Nadal. Manchester City vs Liverpool. Great White Shark vs Roy Scheider.

You continue to grow. You continue to learn. You understand that when you talk about things that match you are talking about what is shared in common. You recognize the value of seeing the world through the lens of a Venn diagram, of knowing the dozens of ways that you and a stranger are different while being able to see the hundreds of ways you are alike. You lay the ground floor of your own empathy, the ability to accept the flawed humanity of others the way you hope they will accept your own.

You continue to grow. You continue to learn. You discover that a match is not required to exist in the same space nor even in the same period of time. You learn how history does indeed repeat itself, how it echoes, how it rhymes. You read the story of human civilization as a series of cycles and repeated mistakes. How nations react to disaster, how politicians react to war, how scared populations react to global pandemics and how disillusioned electorates react to democracy.

You read a diplomat’s description of a world leader that includes a summary list of adjectives describing him as “racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic.” 

You read a military officer’s description of his world leader as someone who “regarded himself as a genius surrounded by bureaucrats who were ‘dumb as a carp,’ winsome intellectuals, eggheads and cowards. Either his men exhibited the ‘sparrow-like brain of mediocrity’ or they talked defeat. He steered only by an inner light…increasingly shielded from any report that conflicted with what he wished to be true. He closed his mind against the truth, but thought he could draw important conclusions from…random observations.”

You read a renowned psychologist’s assessment of a world leader that observes “his only interest is surviving in power and maximizing his power and, regularly, when there has been internal dissent, he has created an external crisis in order to deflect attention from his failed leadership. He exists from crisis to crisis, intolerant of criticism. He has made himself vulnerable by surrounding himself with sycophants who fear to give him negative news. He has limited compassion for his victims.”

You read all of these sentences and know that none of them were written about the haggard, slouching, spray-tanned vat of vomitous word salad that has yet again been nominated to occupy the office of the American presidency. That these sentences instead described murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, genocidal German dictator Adolf Hitler, and genocidal Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. And you try to understand how anybody could fail to see the identical situation in front of them, a Venn diagram that’s a single circle, a man who should probably also die in disgrace within the prison of The Hague.

Except you know that this is the most difficult thing about such revelations: That people will convince themselves that these things do not, will not, cannot possibly match.

So you look closely at the images. You listen closely to the words. You note the ways they repeat, they echo, they rhyme, they match. 

And you remember that when you scratch the surface of a match you may get a sudden burst of light. And you can choose to do something with that light. 

Or you can simply stare at it. 

Choosing to do nothing at all.

Until it burns you.