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My first chess moves...
Aug. 31st, 2010 08:40 pmMy earliest recollection of chess, aside from recognizing the word as describing a game of some kind, occurred when I was about 5 or 6, when my mother - in anticipation of gall bladder surgery - sent me off to spend a few weeks with one of my aunts Catherine, the one who had kids. (My mother had two close friends from the time she attended Hunter College, both named Catherine, and both my honorary aunts as a result. One had a family and kids; the other preferred to devote her life to law at a time when women weren't supposed to exhibit such tendencies.)
I remember only a few things about that experience. First, I was keenly aware that I was the only male child - and the youngest child - in a household with several female children. Second, I remember being taught how to play "Chutes and Ladders," but only after I declined an offer to learn how chess pieces move.
Chess didn't enter my consciousness again until fourth grade.
Fourth grade was the year of Mrs. Rosenstock, the "Pill." The nickname was my mother's invention, and fourth grade was my introduction to an adult that sought actively to take me down a peg or two, although perhaps that's too strong a statement.
Up until fourth grade, I had been a fairly low-profile kind of kid, neither at the top of the class or the bottom. In third grade, I recall, I was among the trailers in the race to read the most books (and to write concomitant book reports, naturally), but in other particulars - math, perhaps, excepted - I was a member of the pack.
That didn't mean I refrained from reading, oh no! In somewhat the same way as the Chukcha of Russian ethnic joke fame, I considered myself a reader, not a writer (at least, not of book reports!).
Things changed for me in fourth grade. I recall one time Mrs. Rosenstock went out of her way to illustrate poor narrative technique by reading one of my book reports to the class. Another time, I was caught red-handed, reading a book about the life of Kit Carson during a mathematics lesson, and suffered the ignominy of a tongue-lashing that seemed to last until the dismissal bell.
My mother made it clear that in life, there are times you just have to play the hand you're dealt, and that year, the New York City Public School System had dealt me Mrs. Rosenstock. My mother indicated that my proper response was to make the best of a bad situation, and wait for fifth grade.
That didn't mean I didn't resist, because I did, using every resource at my disposal. The most convenient was to convincingly exhibit signs of some horrible communicable disease that did not require hospitalization. Amazingly, from time to time my mother would play along with such malingering.
During one such time at home away from school, with both parents off at work, my rummaging in the hall closet uncovered a box of so-called Renaissance chess pieces. I didn't really care about the historical aspect, because frankly, I didn't understand it. What did attract me, though, was how the pieces - some of them - looked like toy soldiers, and there was an instruction booklet in the box.
Oh, what a grand time I had that day! I'm not quite sure I learned much chess, but the pawns, Bishops, Queens, and Kings looked like people, the Knight looked like a mounted warrior, and the Rook - well, I just couldn't wrap my mind around a brick tower balanced on the back of an elephant, y'know? Still, I managed to make up rules of my own, which included prisoner exchanges among the lumpenproletariat pawns, which entertained me until it was time for my parents to return home.
Having related all of that, I ask myself: When did I actually start to play chess? When did a rudimentary knowledge of how to set up pieces and of how they moved pass from a "mechanical" state - the one where every aspect exists independently of every other - into an "integrated" one?
I cannot answer with any certainty (at least, I cannot recall who it was I might have played against). When next I see myself at a chess board, I am at summer camp, in the dining hall playing chess during the hour after lunch instead of flat on my back on my bunk - thinking more about the Good Humor Chocolate Eclair I will buy at the end of the mandated "rest hour" than about anything to do with chess. Life was good.
Cheers...
I remember only a few things about that experience. First, I was keenly aware that I was the only male child - and the youngest child - in a household with several female children. Second, I remember being taught how to play "Chutes and Ladders," but only after I declined an offer to learn how chess pieces move.
Chess didn't enter my consciousness again until fourth grade.
Fourth grade was the year of Mrs. Rosenstock, the "Pill." The nickname was my mother's invention, and fourth grade was my introduction to an adult that sought actively to take me down a peg or two, although perhaps that's too strong a statement.
Up until fourth grade, I had been a fairly low-profile kind of kid, neither at the top of the class or the bottom. In third grade, I recall, I was among the trailers in the race to read the most books (and to write concomitant book reports, naturally), but in other particulars - math, perhaps, excepted - I was a member of the pack.
That didn't mean I refrained from reading, oh no! In somewhat the same way as the Chukcha of Russian ethnic joke fame, I considered myself a reader, not a writer (at least, not of book reports!).
Things changed for me in fourth grade. I recall one time Mrs. Rosenstock went out of her way to illustrate poor narrative technique by reading one of my book reports to the class. Another time, I was caught red-handed, reading a book about the life of Kit Carson during a mathematics lesson, and suffered the ignominy of a tongue-lashing that seemed to last until the dismissal bell.
My mother made it clear that in life, there are times you just have to play the hand you're dealt, and that year, the New York City Public School System had dealt me Mrs. Rosenstock. My mother indicated that my proper response was to make the best of a bad situation, and wait for fifth grade.
That didn't mean I didn't resist, because I did, using every resource at my disposal. The most convenient was to convincingly exhibit signs of some horrible communicable disease that did not require hospitalization. Amazingly, from time to time my mother would play along with such malingering.
During one such time at home away from school, with both parents off at work, my rummaging in the hall closet uncovered a box of so-called Renaissance chess pieces. I didn't really care about the historical aspect, because frankly, I didn't understand it. What did attract me, though, was how the pieces - some of them - looked like toy soldiers, and there was an instruction booklet in the box.
Oh, what a grand time I had that day! I'm not quite sure I learned much chess, but the pawns, Bishops, Queens, and Kings looked like people, the Knight looked like a mounted warrior, and the Rook - well, I just couldn't wrap my mind around a brick tower balanced on the back of an elephant, y'know? Still, I managed to make up rules of my own, which included prisoner exchanges among the lumpenproletariat pawns, which entertained me until it was time for my parents to return home.
Having related all of that, I ask myself: When did I actually start to play chess? When did a rudimentary knowledge of how to set up pieces and of how they moved pass from a "mechanical" state - the one where every aspect exists independently of every other - into an "integrated" one?
I cannot answer with any certainty (at least, I cannot recall who it was I might have played against). When next I see myself at a chess board, I am at summer camp, in the dining hall playing chess during the hour after lunch instead of flat on my back on my bunk - thinking more about the Good Humor Chocolate Eclair I will buy at the end of the mandated "rest hour" than about anything to do with chess. Life was good.
Cheers...
