I was in the chess shop the other day on Thompson St. We hurried past NYU clutching our coffees tight, peering into windows and avoiding the manic traffic on Broadway. The shop itself is quaint and timeless, untouched by the digital age. Old men, some who had no doubt lost their minds at one time or another, held court at long card tables arguing over pawns and queens the way most people argue over mortgages or infidelity. Most of them looked not quite broken just etiolated, as if most of life was a damp cold drizzle that had ever so slowly faded their once radiant spirits. Chess is still sacred to these men, though. Time has not diminished their religion. And I say men because women are few and very far between at the chess shop, especially at night I hear.
Andres and I played a few games. I got crushed, I haven’t played in years and made stupid mistakes. Not seeing the board, not protecting my queen well enough, jumping into traps, you get the idea. At the start of our third game two young boys, twins age 6, sat next to us and began to play. They moved quickly and in silence, the way a battle should be fought between brothers. You could tell by the graceful way in which they would capture a piece in one motion that they knew the game. In fact, the tempo they played at was fairly remarkable for their age. I was fascinated by the way their eyes scanned the board, computing and disputing possibilities in their little heads. About 10 minutes into my own futile game I had lost again and was now completely observing the match between the 6 year old twins. At a particularly tense moment, one of the twins sacrificed a bishop in order to secure slightly better positioning for a pawn in the endgame. The shop proprietor had been watching the game with amused disinterest until this move. When the bishop was sacrificed his face lit up and for a brief moment the twins appeared to be the oldest people in the room.
After the game (inevitably the twin who made the bishop sacrifice won), the mother of the boys came into the shop looking disheveled and only slightly homeless. She took off her huge headphones and inquired about the game we just watched. After explaining to her what we just witnessed and complimenting her on the twins precociousness, she simply brushed it off and laughed. “I don’t even know how to play chess,” she said with a certain pride. I hope these boys grow up to be like their mother. The rest of the day I couldn’t help but wonder what it was she was listening to in those giant headphones.
(jj)
