Phyllis Nutkis
Among his many interests, my father liked to play chess. He didn’t have much time to play with friends, and my mother didn’t play, so he played through the mail with opponents in distant cities. He had a set of postcards; each one had a blank chessboard printed on it, and he would indicate his move and put on a three-cent stamp and mail the card off to whomever he was playing against. His opponent would eventually respond with a postcard of his own. To record the moves, my father had a small spiral-bound book with a chessboard printed on each cardboard page. Each square on the chessboard had a slot, into which my father inserted tiny cardboard chess men to record the positions of the pieces after each move. At this pace, games must have taken months, or even years.
He taught me the basic rules of chess when I was 9 or 10 years old, and we used to play a couple of times a week. I knew how all the pieces moved, but since I didn’t understand any of the strategies—and I certainly never got the hang of standard moves like the Sicilian Defense or the Queen’s Gambit—these were short games, and I lost all of them.
When I finally won a game after months of playing, I was thrilled and went around bragging about it for days. It was several years before I realized that my father had deliberately lost. What amazed me then (besides the fact that it had taken me so long to figure that out) was how my father had had the patience to sit there and play probably a hundred games of chess with a 9-year-old who never, ever got any better at it.
I haven’t played chess in years. But after 3 children and 6 grandchildren and 15 years of teaching preschool and kindergarten, I’ve played at least 4,000 games of Candyland, which is not nearly as interesting as chess and thus requires a lot more patience. When it seems as though the game is going to go on forever because someone just got sent back to the Lollipop Forest, I’m reminded of my father’s patience in playing chess with me as a 9-year-old, and how he never ended a game early, on some pretense.
A better lesson, in the end, than the Sicilian Defense.