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It’s getting harder and harder to play. My toys keep ending up with my grandchildren.
Janell got the clarinet last year when she decided to go into band, and I want you to know it doesn’t make me one bit jealous that she could play tunes the second time she put the instrument in her mouth.
She got the electronic keyboard a couple years ago. Her ability to play anything she hears doesn’t make me feel the least bit inadequate.
Ben has the mountain bike. He rides it all over the property, into the woods, across rough spots, even down steps in the parking area. It’s wonderful that he figured out how to shift into all those gears. As for me — who needs gears?
The electronic chess board took me by surprise. Ben was telling me how, when he plays himself, the side he chooses to care about always loses. Seems he was playing one side, then making a move for the other side, much the way I sometimes play Scrabble with myself. It works OK with Scrabble, but chess is so much about strategy it mostly just frustrated Ben.
He clearly needed my computer chess board. You make a move and the computer makes a move, you move, the computer moves. It’s like playing with a real person except you have to physically move the chess piece where the computer tells you to put it. As you learn the game, you can move the computer to higher and higher levels of skill
So Ben borrowed my chess computer and we made a deal to play each other as soon as I get good enough.
But the next day he rode his bike down to my house to tell me that he’d beat the chess board twice at level two. Then he described what he’d been doing wrong before he started winning. “I kept forgetting to leave a hatch for the queen to escape,” he said. He went over to the regular chess board I have set up on the coffee table and moved pieces around to show me what he meant.
About now it’s dawning on me, I can’t play chess with this kid. He’s too good. Don’t ask me how old he is, because I can’t keep up with that stuff. It keeps changing. He’s somewhere in elementary school. But he’s good, and he can talk about strategy in chess moves.
I need to practice if I want to get good enough to play chess with Ben, but I can’t while the computer chess board is at his house. I can’t take it back, either, because now his dad is involved — boasted about beating it in five minutes, then realized he was playing at the beginner’s level. With typical male confidence, Ben’s father moved it from level one to level eight. The computer beat him in two minutes. Now he’s at some level in the middle.
I got myself another chess computer so I can practice, they can practice until we can play each other for real.
So that takes care of my toy, I thought.
Yesterday, Janell confided that the electronic keyboard is easier to play, but the baby grand at my house sure makes her feel more professional. And she can play all the low notes that don’t exist on the keyboard.
Well, okay.
But not the drums. Nobody gets the drums.
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Sara Pitzer