He was a high school teacher with a salary just slightly more than a 7-11 employee, a proud union man, and a home fixer-upper whose idea of a great weekend involved ripping out drywall. He was a fiercely liberal Democrat who wrote angry letters to The Nation when he felt they were leaning too far to the middle. I never made the connection between my grandfather’s Monopoly strategy and his personal life. “I’ll be fine,” he said, counting his increasingly small stacks of cash. “You’re playing this wrong!” we’d scream at him. He rarely invested in real estate or utility companies, opting instead to hold onto his tiny fake money because he was “saving for the future.” When he did buy property, he declined to charge us rent when we landed on his space. Do you even want to get to Candy Castle, dude?īut he never seemed to care. That’s like playing Candyland and not caring if you get the Ice Cream Sea card. Which is crazy, because that’s the whole point of Monopoly. He also played like somebody who wasn’t all that interested in bankrupting his family with real estate investments. We never got a lecture on the symbolism of Monopoly tokens, or how by choosing the top hat we were buying into a culture of winner-take-all capitalism. If he had a reason, he never came out and explained it. The Scottie dog, which looked like it belonged on the lap of somebody powerful and affluent, who fed it caviare and called it “sweetums.”īut my grandfather always saw himself as the work boot. My brother and I gravitated towards what we considered the “power” pieces. Not coincidentally (at least to us) he always lost. When we were kids, my brother and I used to play Monopoly with my grandfather.
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