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Saturday, November 11, 2006

Chess

My six year-old son loves chess. He likes it as some kind of gross abstraction because he cannot be bothered to understand it beyond what pieces are and are not allowed to do, and even at that he spends much of his time ruminating about what he would do if the rules were different.

But he loves it and it does afford us quality time together during which I am welcome to delude myself that I can teach him life lessons he has very little interest in learning. He is six, after all.

I have one of those Franklin Mint Civil War chess sets with little pewter pieces, some of whom are specific historic figures. My mother thought it was neat and ordered it for me when I was young - my memory is that it took almost three years to show up in its entirety as it was parceled out two pieces every couple of months.

Anyway, this chess set is one of those treasures my father unearthed somewhere in his house that showed up at mine recently. I had not seen it in years and my son was completely ecstatic.

We pulled out the Civil War chess set to have a game the other night. Chess with a six year-old is not quite the time commitment that you think of chess as being. I can normally beat him in about fifteen minutes, and it only takes that long because he always forgets it's his turn.

It is immediately obvious that the set is missing a piece. It is not obvious until it is completely set up what piece it is. I am blue (because I am always black), and after struggling a bit sorting out the pieces I discover that the piece missing from the set is the blue king. Abraham Lincoln. This makes it somewhat less likely that, as my wife suggested, it simply fell out somewhere.

Fortunately, we had a Batman Pez dispenser close at hand, so we have been playing with that as the blue king. My son is so jealous of my king that he has announced his intention to jump the fence and captain the blue team next time.

I cannot wait until he is old enough to appreciate how funny and how wrong it was that in the conflict for our country's soul, we somehow replaced Abraham Lincoln, the guys who delivered the Gettysburg Address, signed the Emancipation Proclamation and earned a place on the penny, with a Batman Pez dispenser. Things would have been different, I tell you.

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