I opened the dryer door a week and a half ago and smiled to myself, then chuckled as I said out loud: “Let the games begin!” I could have subbed in the ever-popular “Game on!” but the first seemed more fitting. You may be thinking, How weird or What on earth does this have to do with dryers?
You see, I decided to go back to using dryer balls—those organic, friendly, unbouncy, wool tennis-sized balls that (reportedly) do the same job as dryer sheets but without any scent at all. Great news for someone like me with scent sensitivities. And they are even said (reportedly) to decrease dryer time, thereby saving $$ in electricity costs (I assigned a conservative “$$” here because I don’t know how accurate the calculated savings are).
But back to “the games.” My last attempt at using dryer balls lasted about 10 months, which I thought was pretty good since they were quite elusive. If Harry Houdini, the great American escape artist, had invented anything, I think it would have been dryer balls. Round 1: Josephine, in the far corner, waiting for the Ding! And, in the opposite corner, six wily opponents gaining momentum and preparing to hurl themselves out of their corner (the drum) and boldly go where no dryer balls have gone before …
That might sound overly dramatic but it really has become a game of sorts.
They lunge and roll their way into laundry baskets, behind furniture, down the hallway or under the bed—that last one demanding that I shift to a crawl-and-sweep maneuver, using whatever long implements I can find … a shoe, a broom or even the vacuum cleaner—a real workout as we have a Yukon-made, four-poster pine bed that is beautiful but immoveable.
They hide themselves in shirt sleeves and bed linens and pop gleefully out of my nightgown sleeve under the cover of darkness. And the most gifted escape artist of all looked up and smiled at my daughter from a planter box outside of her dry cabin, about 10 minutes from our place. She does her laundry at our place (they aren’t that talented).
Hence my Let the games begin, which brings me to the idiom and the even more popular Game on! version of that. Dryer balls aside, the idiom has so much more to do with life’s challenges, often issued to one another in a moment of joviality, frivolity or hilarity—with an I-dare-you, exclamatory tone—and are most often met with an echoing “Game on!” or sometimes a “Let the games begin!”
Some may recall the cry of “Game on!” in the 1991 comedy Wayne’s World. And some may relate it to a game of darts. Whatever competition it reminds you of, it’s typically friendly, even if it’s said in a quasi-serious, competitive tone.
And occasionally it’s a collective Game on! A Let’s do this! or a Let’s roll! That last one brings back memories of 9/11, of a day we would all like to forget, and is a reminder of the courage heard in Todd Beamer’s collective call to action on board United Airlines Flight 93. Truthfully, for as long as we can remember, we will never forget.
Some may be concerned about me issuing a challenge to my “new and adventurous friends,” but, hey, there must be some humour in the mundane things of life, and I can’t think of a more mundane household chore than laundry.
So, let the games begin!
