The Pedestal Board

For a man who had once been president of a college chess club, my father did not actually play chess with me very often.

Maybe a dozen times in all.

Memory makes it feel like more.

Perhaps because each game seemed to occur outside ordinary time.

The board did not live out in the open as a casual household game. It had gravity.

It was brought out.

Almost summoned.

And the board itself was no mere board.

It stood on a pedestal, a serious piece of furniture, almost altar-like to my childhood eyes. I believe it may have been made by his brother Jim—solid, crafted, bearing that family confidence in wood and making. It seemed less purchased than inherited into existence.

And the pieces were even stranger and more beautiful.

Ceramic.

Hand-painted by my grandmother.

Not anonymous factory knights and rooks, but pieces touched by family hands before they ever reached mine.

I think even as a boy I sensed this was not just a game set.

It was a kind of domestic relic.

When it came out, something ceremonial entered the room.

My father would show me how the pieces moved.

The knight’s strange leap delighted me first, that impossible L-shape hop that seemed almost magical.

The bishop sliding diagonally felt elegant.

The queen terrifying.

He explained openings, threats, forks, the need to think ahead.

I understood little beyond fragments.

But I loved the atmosphere of concentrated quiet around the game.

The way his mind seemed to reveal itself there.

Chess suited him.

Or maybe he had been partly formed by chess.

Patience.

Pattern recognition.

Economy.

The capacity to think several moves beyond the visible.

I can see now those were traits he carried into much else—farming, fixing machinery, navigating life.

Even the way he rigged old equipment on the farm had something chess-like in it.

Position.

Consequence.

Improvisation within rules.

As a child, though, what I mostly knew was that I was sitting across from my father in a serious exchange.

Not talking much.

Thinking together.

There was intimacy in that.

Especially because my father’s affection often came sideways, through doing rather than declaring.

Teaching me chess belonged to that language.

He was not trying to make me a prodigy.

There was no grand ambition in it.

Just an offering.

Here is something I know.

Take it.

I never became much of a player.

Certainly not a master.

I learned enough to hold my own, enough to appreciate the strange beauty of the game, enough to keep returning to it occasionally across life.

And I’ve come to think that was enough.

Because what mattered was less mastery than inheritance.

I taught all my children to play when they were young.

And in doing so I felt something quietly circular happen.

My father’s hands moving a knight.

My hands doing the same.

A pattern passed on.

Three generations joined by a rule set older than any of us.

There is something fitting that the former chess-club president, who became so fully a farmer in my imagination, still left this emblem of his earlier self in the house.

The pedestal board stood almost like evidence.

Proof the scholar had not vanished.

He was there all along.

Waiting under the dust cover.

The rarity of our games made them more precious. If we had played every week they would blur.

Instead I remember each as an event.

The heavy pieces in my hand.

The hush around the board.

The faint smell of wood polish.

My father pausing before a move.

And me studying his face, trying to understand not only the game but the mind across from me.

Chess has always carried a metaphorical burden people sometimes overstate—life as strategy, kings under siege, all that.

But I think for me it means something simpler.

It means sitting across from someone you love, attending.

Thinking in shared silence.

Learning patience one move at a time.

And I like that the board itself was already collaborative before we ever played on it.

His brother built it.

His mother painted the pieces.

His son learned the game there.

His grandchildren inherited it.

A family arranged around thirty-two pieces.

There is something almost perfect in that.

And sometimes I think the deepest things parents teach are not the lessons they emphasize most, but the ones folded into small repeated acts.

How to hold a hammer.

How to drive long roads.

How to say Mont-Saint-Michel.

How a knight moves.

All these years later, I may not remember many openings.

But I remember my father reaching out, touching a bishop lightly, and saying,

“Watch this.”

And then showing me a possibility I hadn’t seen.