Therefore, every chess player in my family has a cherished memory of their first victory. And as a matter of strict principle, he never let kids win. Grandpa Jack was a strong player, the wielder of a conservative and positional style. I remember the clunk of the dense pieces on wood.Īs a child, I spent every summer on that farm, jumping on hay bales and swimming and playing game after game of chess in the late-afternoon light. I remember the sharp spikes on the rims of the queens’ crowns and the neat, crenelated battlements of the rooks. The other knights, I thought, had a look of terror in their eyes. By the time I arrived, one of the knights had lost its head. The pieces, purchased by my grandparents on their honeymoon to Mexico in 1949, were slender, made of ebony and ivory. The felt had curled up at its corners after hosting decades of battle in a small farmhouse in eastern Iowa. It was a homemade Christmas gift from my mother’s siblings to their father, my grandfather Jack. It was an irregular and heavy slab of walnut, maybe 14 inches on a side, onto which green squares of felt had been carefully glued by hand. I still remember the first board on which I ever played chess.
