He Won

My oldest boy is eleven. He’s fairly bright.

He’s got a kind of internal gyroscope going: one that keeps him from behaving badly. He is occasionally frantic and silly, like all boys his age are wont to be, but I’ve literally never seen him be deliberately unkind to another person. Conversely, he’s almost literally stunned when anyone is mean to him; it’s as if someone from another planet is being presented to him, a planet with strange and unpleasant customs. He doesn’t get his inner light from me, I’m as mean as Cuchulain with a pebble in his shoe. Must be his mother.

At any rate, he plays chess. He learned on my old 486 vintage computer, when he was barely out of diapers, by moving the pieces on the virtual chessboard with the mouse. The game would automatically place your piece back where you started if you tried anything non-standard, and he learned the moves, hit or miss, by paying attention to what was not allowed. Just like life.

I started playing with him when he was four. I was always black, and removed my queen from the board before we began. And then I’d slaughter him.

I gave him the old books I learned from all those years ago. J.R. Capablanca, the Cuban chess phenom guided him on his musty pages, as he had me. J.R.’s been as dead as a pharoah for half a century. I’d slaughter him less severely.

They decided to try a chess club at his school last year. He came home after the first session, and was kind of subdued. I sensed a problem.

Did you play chess?
Yes.
How many games?
Fourteen, I think.
How many did you win?
All of them.
Did you play against all your friends?
At first. Then the teacher. He say’s he’s going to get a book and study up for next time.

We don’t play often. I work a lot, and spare time is hard to come by for both of us. We returned home from the Thanksgiving trip, and he and I were rattling around the house while his mother and brother slept. There was a tremendous rain and windstorm going outside, and I figured the lights would wink out any minute. I was weary of the sight of anything electronic. Let’s play.

He beat me. He made no errors. I baited him with many potential possibilities to take a piece and lose the game. He ignored them. I clawed and grabbed to the end, and took multiple queens from him. He kept giving them up, sometimes just for a pawn, and got another one. He was like an anaconda. He was ahead from the start, and leveraged it inexorably into a win. He did not exult. He had a look of shock, almost. A kind of gratification tempered with awe.

I don’t remember the last time anyone beat me at chess. I stopped playing because not many people were interested in playing, and even fewer in playing and losing.

So now I am faced with a problem. If I play black without a queen forever, I may never win again.

He is a superior sort of person than I, my son. It is gratifying for a man to roll that idea around in his head. Not smarter, exactly. Intellect alone does not make a man valuable to his brethren. He has that rare combination of intellectual acuity chained to a thoughtful and pleasant personality. He is immune to evil.

I put him to bed. I thought for a long moment, alone in the dim light from the embers of the evening fire, and threw the black queen in the fireplace.

Have A Pleasant Thanksgiving

There are lots of news stories available –the majority of them, I think– expounding on the horrors of Thanksgiving. “Send us your dysfunctional family Thanksgiving disaster stories” is the lede on every radio program I can find, that hasn’t jumped the gun entirely and started with “Tell us your Christmas horror stories.”

I’m not having it. Thanksgiving is lovely. Or it should be.

Thanksgiving doesn’t beat around the bush; right in the name it tells you it’s a day to be grateful. Complaining about it seems to me to be like going to the art museum and complaining that the paintings are obscuring your view of the walls.

Hmm. Perhaps that’s a bad simile. I’ve been to many museums where the dropcloth daubs they hang on the walls aren’t as interesting as the off-white paint, now that I consider it. So please insert “Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy” in the preceding paragraph where “art museum” appears. Thanks.

Anyway, it’s not about you. For one day, at least, I don’t want to hear about your crabby attitude towards your assembled family and your overcooked turkey. I don’t want to hear about the lousy TV you’ve got to watch the football game on. I don’t care if you don’t like the floats that drift by Macy’s like garish barrage balloons. Put a sock in it. It’s not about you.

It’s not about any of us. It’s about remembering that everything we have is a gift, and we could lose it, and we should take time out from our lives for one day a year and acknowledge that.

Have you ever been in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving? I hate the preening socialites and politicians that visit there on Thanksgiving to get face time on TV. I think much more kindly about the people that feed those poor souls on November 22nd and November 24th, when the cameras aren’t interested.

There’s a look on a person’s face, when someone gives them something they need that they might not have otherwise. It’s the look on the face of the man in line at the soup kitchen. It’s gratitude.

I’m going to give it a try tomorrow, that look. It looks like Thanksgiving.

The Tea Table

“He’s coming here to collect!”

Tom Chippendale knew his good lady wife was prone to fits of panic. But if he heard one more word about the butcher’s bill being unpaid, he promised himself he’d head to the inn for a dram. The woman had no faith in him, is all. He always managed to bring home the bacon in the nick, didn’t he? And the tea table (like this one) he had made for the Prince of Wales- that would cover the butcher’s bill, and ten others. And the daft woman wants to give it to Annabelle, the butcher’s wife, for a measly three months back debt!

“The Prince don’t pay!” she’d screeched, not understanding that a man in the prince’s position cannot be DUNNED, for the love of the Savior! The Chippendales would get their money bye and bye, he replied.

“Bye and bye!” she shrieked like a jackdaw. “We’ll need a joint of beef a damn sight sooner than bye and bye!”

“Oh, what would a butcher’s wife do with the table anyway?” he mused aloud. “Made for royalty from the finest Santo Domingo mahogany, for the future king of England’s… well, ahem, the woman he… the fine lady… his… his… ”

“His konkabine!” she erupted again. “Well, if you owes her ‘usband tuppence, Annabelle puts on airs like the queen of Araby, she does! She’ll know right what to do with it!” she added with a snort.

But he was adamant. He waved his hand with a flourish and banished his wife from the drawing room.

He paused to compose himself and listened to the mantel clock tick solemnly for a few moments. He heard footfalls outside, and then a sharp rap at the door. He opened it. There stood the butcher, looking like he had a toothache, and behind him, blotting out the sun, was the constable, looking like he hadn’t heard a good joke in ten years.

“Good… good after… after… noon,” he stammered, feeling a bit lightheaded, and a little on his heels. “We were? I mean… my wife and I were just… what I meant to say is…” The butcher’s expression began to look like it had been carved from stone by a lost tribe, to frighten tomb-raiders. The constable assumed the expression of a man with a pebble in his shoe.

But then Tom’s world swam back into focus, a smile blossomed again on his face, and he stretched out his hand and offered- “Come in, come in. Would you like some TEA?”

The North East Kingdom

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I make furniture here and Massachusetts and sell it on the internet, all over the country. There’s some in Canada, and some in Great Britain, but the people that own it lugged it there from America. I don’t sell internationally. Your money is too complicated, and except for all that Nigerian e-mail loot I’m going to get, I stick to what I know: American.

I offer a print catalog. People from all over this wonderful land of ours sign up to receive one. I never tire of seeing all the disparate places that turn up each day. America is a big wonderful place, filled with nice people. It captures my imagination to hear from them.

Every state in the union is represented on my list but one. I can only draw inferences, as I have no facts to go on, but apparently no one in North Dakota needs furniture. Or they don’t have any money. Or they don’t like furniture makers from Massachusetts with logorrhea. Or they don’t have the internet or running water. Or no one lives there anymore, and the two Senators and one Congressman didn’t want to tell anybody or they’d lose their gig. An impenetrable mystery.

At any rate, lots of people from everywhere else want a catalog. But there was another place that was very sparsely represented on my little list, and it’s not as far away –theoretical almost– as North Dakota. That place is Vermont.

Well, Karen from Vermont –“The North East Kingdom” — showed up in the comments this weekend, and left me a little missive from a fellow traveler in the world of Quickbooks, hard work, and flinty irascibility:

I come by now and then, sit on the steps of your porch and admire your words and pictures. It occured to me that i could purchase your furniture and just signed up for a catologue- i’m psyched to view the finished product and try to pretend i could have the insight to see the grain in the rough (i can’t see it, but i can feel it). We burn wood for heat up here (NEK = Northeast Kingdom = VT) We cut down cherry last year and i thanked God for it’s warmth as i just about cried every time i added a piece to the fire.

Well, thanks Karen. She says she reads Ambivablog, so we know she’s alright. And she lives in Vermont, so we know she’s interesting. For all the rest of you out there in the rest of the landscape, let me assure you: Vermont is a beautiful and interesting place.
I used to visit Vermont fairly often. I strapped boards to my feet and slid down their ice masquerading as snow a lot when I was younger and had no bairns to feed. There is skiing all over the northeast, of course, but for some reason, Vermont seemed to me the ne plus ultra for hurtling down the mountain. I made a gag map for a skiing companion once. It said SKI MAP on the front, and I had used a magic marker to totally black out Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine on it. Those places have their own charms of course, but they don’t have Ludlow. People in Vermont hate people from Massachusetts that come to ski. I always liked that about them.

It’s produced the most interesting people, whose common attribute seems only to be that they don’t have any common attributes –they’re just not like anybody else, anywhere else. Vermont can produce Bernie Sanders and Calvin Coolidge. Go figure.

I wrote a little story about Vermont to go with a table I make. Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont when he wrote The Jungle Book.

I want you to read that sentence again, and mull it over:

Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont when he wrote The Jungle Book.

Go figure. Anyway, that’s the sort of place Vermont has always been, and will always be, in all likelihood. The place that makes you say: go figure.

The Kipling Table

Happy Sunday

Grab some pine.