A few weeks ago, we had a little girl and her parents come spend the day with us. During the course of the evening, she began to chase me around saying that she wanted to play chess. This did not surprise me since I have been playing chess since I was a little bit older than her. While I don’t know where she got the idea from, she would not let it go until I made it happen.
Chess. Five-year-old. This should be fun.
Between her dad and I, we cleared off a section on the table, pulled out the board and pieces and set it up all while under the watchful, grinning eyes of a little girl positioned across the table from me.
All right, let’s do this.
I remember as a kid playing against my dad, who had originally taught me, and this brought back all those familiar feelings again and it made me smile, but then something happened after I made the first move.
I started heading down a memory that had been there for a while, but I hadn’t acknowledged it. In my head, I started to make plans on how to play with her in this, Game of Kings, and teach her “lessons” and show her how the game was really played. I was going to teach her a lesson, cat-and-mouse style just so she learned something.
With those thoughts I went back years to a little boy in his dad’s den, standing there, waiting for him to finish the paperwork on his desk, holding a frail box of cheap plastic pieces and a cardboard chessboard, waiting. After what seemed like an eternity, he would turn his attention to me and say, “Well why haven’t you gotten it set up yet?” to which I would point to the couch and he would say, “No, I don’t have time, set it up on the floor and I will call out the moves, this won’t take long.” Quickly, I got to work setting up the board on the floor in front of his chair and when he turned back around, he made a quick lesson of reminding me of algebraic chess notation and then said that he would call out the moves and I would have to move them for him. I didn’t care, I just wanted to play with him.
After what seemed like forever waiting for him, setting up the board, having a lesson on chess notation and then thoroughly getting beaten in this game, within minutes I might add, he would look at me and say, “Have you learned a lesson? Go practice some more and if you get better, maybe I’ll have some time to play with you later.” I would stand there confused, lost, exacerbated, looking back at what I did wrong thinking, I should’ve had the board ready; I should’ve had chess notation down. I was tired, confused and defeated.
Don’t get me wrong. My dad was not an intentionally cruel man, he never set out to hurt anything or anyone, but he always seemed to come up a little short in areas. I would later call it “sacrificing the moment.” My dad cared about me and I know he did because we would always go back to the chessboard. I read somewhere that your dad is the only man in the world that wants you to do better than he did. I believe that’s very true. The difference between him and I is that I have learned to recognize “moments.”
Back to 44 years later. Little brown ringlets of curls are sitting across the table from me, multi-colored fingernail polish on chubby digits are waiting to grab the next piece. Meanwhile, her father is doing everything he can to keep her still while she waits for me to move. You know what I did?
I dumped all those memories for the moment and chose to recognize the moment.
I moved an arbitrary piece with no rhyme or reason, her father looked up at me and laughed. She then grabbed her piece and moved it anywhere she wanted to on the board, under her father‘s vague rule enforcement of course. Again, I grabbed a random piece and put it out on the board to watch the five-year-old immediately grab one of her pieces and switch it with mine. A great big smile looked at me and said something to the effect of, “This is mine.”
Her dad and I had a good chuckle.
Over the course of the next 15 or so minutes, she started to get a collection of my pieces on the far side of the board and, if memory serves me right, I might have even heard a little voice say, “Hurry up and lose that piece so I can add it to my collection.”
In the end, after a most valiant attempt, I was forced to surrender and I have to tell you it was a great feeling. I looked at her dad and said, “Hopefully I will not be her last game of chess, but I do have the distinction of being her first game.”
“That you do, sir,“ came the response from proud dad across the table, “that you do.”
It was at that moment I realized something very powerful. I had learned something from those games many years ago! I had learned the bigger game of chess. I had learned the true meaning of sitting down for the game.
I’d like to think that I played that game perfectly.
Go make your mark in this world.
