Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember my mother teaching me to play chess.  This was in Stormville, so I was no older than seven, and probably five or six.  Like everyone, I was intrigued and surprised by the way the knight moved.  I was also surprised that the Queen had so much more power than the King.  Although in our house mother and father were pretty much equal, it was a novelty not to see the King acknowledged as the lord and master on the chess board.  The Kings were so different from Kings in checkers, a game my father taught me to play.

In fact he taught us all the games we played: he knew how to turn the rules, printed on the back of the top half of a game box, into an actual game.  He'd read the rules and understand them and turn them into something fun!  This was one of the traits that I most valued in him: how a new game could be something we were playing after just a few minutes.

I recognized immediately that chess was the superior game -- I think I may have already known this in fact, which was why I wanted to learn to play chess.  And my father didn't know how to play, but my mother did.  So that the Queen's superiority in chess seemed appropriate: my mother knew how to play chess and my father didn't, and the Queen could range the board, while the King was stuck (maybe a bit like my father on the toilet in his long morning monopolization of the bathroom).

And I remember in the very first game I played with my mother, one of probably less than a dozen games total, I took her Queen with my Knight!

posted by William 2:39 PM
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