Keep the Other Person

I don’t play chess very well.  My only stratagem is to keep the other person on the defensive, exploit even trades or better.  I can think a few moves head, trying to mount an assault on the king’s person.  But sometimes, as when I cook, I tend to be sloppy and overlook things.  Fortunately, both my daughters have come far enough along to regularly best me. 

 

I noticed my wife and my daughter playing the other day.  My wife doesn’t usually play western chess.  We also have a xiangqi set over on the table.  Chinese chess is similar to the western variant.  There’s a river in the middle of the board.  The king can’t do much.  There are pawns and heavier artillery.  I always need to shake off the cobwebs and lose a few games before I’m back in the swing of it.  In this case, she was audibly repeating the rules of western chess just like I would have had to do, considering the characters carved into the top of each xiangqi piece. 

 

Tonight, I suggested we play, and she was excited to do so.  We set up the board.  I had a half hour or so before a call.  I mentioned mnemonics like ‘queen-on-color’ and offered that she should go first as she had the white side.  I brought out my horses.  She wanted to know why, and did the same.  She thrust a bishop deep into my territory, neatly incapacitating my horsemen and I paused and prepared to castle with my king.  “Did she teach you this move?”  “Yes. Yes, I know.”   A moment later I’d carelessly sacrificed a castle and my repositioning to thrust to her right wasted time and she artfully pinned my king in and won the game.  Crestfallen, surely, I congratulated her with genuine humility. 

This morning I’d flopped around in the bed in the study, half awake, reading a novel that was finally congealing and properly demanding my attention.  “The Overstory’ by Richard Powers culminates in a crime, as response to a crime, and its set out in the Oregonian old growth that I had a chance to visit and camp and connect with folks in Earth First who were the tribe from which Mr. Powers was crafting this gaggle of heroes.  The stories touched sometimes, and other times only wafted up close, in the eerie way that trees share information across the river and over the mountains.  The Hoel family had grew a large chestnut tree.  I think I will as well.

 

 

 

Wednesday, 11/18/20