Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Chess Set
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Growing up in San Francisco, in my teen years I first learned about the game of chess by accident. One day, I came across a cluster of elderly Chinese men playing the game in a public park in Chinatown.
In my home, chess was an unknown luxury. My parents eked out a living with hard work and pinched pennies. Fearing the next Great Depression, they saved rubber bands, balls of string, empty grocery bags, screws, nails, just about everything. Old clothes were reborn as dish rags. A chess set, even a cheap plastic one, never entered their minds.
When my dad got home from work, exhausted and smelling of axle grease, he slumped into his favorite chair, popped open a beer and clicked on a television game show. Board games he considered a waste of money.
Years later on the island of Corfu, when I could have been outside smelling fragrant laurel trees, watching fisherman returning to harbor with boatloads of silvery mackerel or eyeing fruit vendors under colorful, striped awnings, I found myself indoors stuck in a souvenir shop. Hermes, the Greek god of shopkeepers, must have been laughing at me.
Among stacks of blue and white kaftans, jewelry, coffee cups, copper pots, straw baskets, Grecian urns and Acropolis keychains, my wife is looking for holiday gifts for her parents, my parents, her aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, her book club, our gardener, the postman, the neighbors. Like a Greek falcon flushing its prey, my wife is hovering over a brass chess set.
The rooks are Doric columns. The queen, a Hellenic goddess. The pawns, Greek warriors with shields. The white team wears green patina; the opposing team, metallic black. The statuesque king is three inches tall.
I lift a piece, and it is heavy, solid. The set must weigh thirty pounds, at least.
“Don’t buy it,” I argue. “It’s too heavy. We can’t afford to ship it.”
My wife smiles, then like an Olympian throwing a javelin hurls her retort, “But you’ve always wanted a chess set.”
Closing with the generosity gambit, she adds, “I’ll carry it.” Checkmate.
Minutes later, she is hauling her conquest out of the store. On two ferry rides, up and down hotel steps, in and out of taxis and through three airports, she lugs the chess set. On its odyssey, I hear it thud when she needs to put it down.
Once home, we can’t find a chessboard to match the outsized pieces, so the set disappears into storage. Five years go by before a furniture maker in Mexico City custom-builds a table with an inlaid marble chessboard.
A year passes before the table and board arrives. It wobbles. After I disassemble and rebuild it, we then discover the individual, hand-milled chess pieces have uneven bottoms. At the slightest touch, they fall over. The pieces go back into storage until, seven years later, a machinist affixes weighted brass bases.
Thirteen and half years after our Corfu holiday, I finally have my dream chess set to dust but never use. Like my dad, I don’t play the game. I don’t know how.
Like the archaeological ruins of an Athenian city state, the chess set stands silent and abandoned in our living room. An unspoken love poem in the empty spaces of our conversations.
