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Chess... first contacts...
My very earliest memory of chess is at the age of three or four. I have been sent by my parents to a college friend of my mother's in Baltimore. My mother, it turns out, is going into the hospital to have a gall bladder removed, and I am deemed too much of a handful for my grandmother or stepfather. So, off to Baltimore I go.
I don't remember much of that place, except that all the children were girls and all older than me. I recall them trying to engage me in games. They taught me to play "war" with cards. They taught me to play "chutes and ladders." They taught me to play "Chinese" checkers.
And they attempted to teach me to play chess, but the game made no sense to me at the time, so we all went on to other things.
My next memory of chess is sometime in fourth grade. Mrs. Rosenstock is my teacher. My mother has nicknamed her "the pill," because she is very hard for me to "swallow." She picks on me, makes me the goat whenever she can, it seems. Even my mother, who is a schoolteacher herself, agrees that I am "in for it." It is an era when parents had not yet learned to sue - or threaten to sue - everyone and anyone for real or imagined slights suffered by their children, and I was expected to buckle down and bear it.
I managed to be home sick from school a lot in fourth grade. Sometimes, I was actually ill, too. This one time, I'm home from school, feeling bored. My stepdad is at work, as is my mom. I cautiously start to rustle around the bottom portion of the hall closet and come up with... a chess set.
A Renaissance chess set. The pieces, for the most part, looked like people. The king was... well.. kingly. The queen looked a little like Marilyn Monroe (I had a pretty good imagination). The bishops looked awfully Roman Catholic. The knights were in armor, astride horses. The rooks were elephants with brick towers on their back (go figure). And each pawn had been issued his very own helmet, sword, and shield.
The rules still made no sense to me, so I ignored them. But there was something about the symmetry of the board, the weight of the felted chess pieces, and the "rightness" of how the pieces looked when they stood in the very center of a square that attracted me.
I spent most of the day using the set as "soldiers." I arranged for pitched battles where everyone died and was immediately resurrected, where prisoners were exchanged, and where queens were kidnapped and then saved by daring knights (with support from the lumbering elephant-rooks).
The set was back in its box and in the bottom of the closet by the time my mother got home. My next "caissic" experience would not occur for some years.
Cheers...
I don't remember much of that place, except that all the children were girls and all older than me. I recall them trying to engage me in games. They taught me to play "war" with cards. They taught me to play "chutes and ladders." They taught me to play "Chinese" checkers.
And they attempted to teach me to play chess, but the game made no sense to me at the time, so we all went on to other things.
My next memory of chess is sometime in fourth grade. Mrs. Rosenstock is my teacher. My mother has nicknamed her "the pill," because she is very hard for me to "swallow." She picks on me, makes me the goat whenever she can, it seems. Even my mother, who is a schoolteacher herself, agrees that I am "in for it." It is an era when parents had not yet learned to sue - or threaten to sue - everyone and anyone for real or imagined slights suffered by their children, and I was expected to buckle down and bear it.
I managed to be home sick from school a lot in fourth grade. Sometimes, I was actually ill, too. This one time, I'm home from school, feeling bored. My stepdad is at work, as is my mom. I cautiously start to rustle around the bottom portion of the hall closet and come up with... a chess set.
A Renaissance chess set. The pieces, for the most part, looked like people. The king was... well.. kingly. The queen looked a little like Marilyn Monroe (I had a pretty good imagination). The bishops looked awfully Roman Catholic. The knights were in armor, astride horses. The rooks were elephants with brick towers on their back (go figure). And each pawn had been issued his very own helmet, sword, and shield.
The rules still made no sense to me, so I ignored them. But there was something about the symmetry of the board, the weight of the felted chess pieces, and the "rightness" of how the pieces looked when they stood in the very center of a square that attracted me.
I spent most of the day using the set as "soldiers." I arranged for pitched battles where everyone died and was immediately resurrected, where prisoners were exchanged, and where queens were kidnapped and then saved by daring knights (with support from the lumbering elephant-rooks).
The set was back in its box and in the bottom of the closet by the time my mother got home. My next "caissic" experience would not occur for some years.
Cheers...