chess

I think there's a limited number of really cool girls in this world, and I seem to know more than a handful of them. I have good taste, what can you say? She's one of those really cool girls who's always slipping out of boys' fingers, because those kinds of girls move so fast that nobody can ever hold them down, not churches nor smothering families and certainly not the social conventions.

The conventions say that girls don't play chess--but she does. So that's why when I walked in, the men there were reluctant to greet me for fear of scaring me away. It's one of those really old fashioned buildings with the tiles set a certain way that set me in a nostalgic mood for the years I spent going to school on the east coast of the United States too. Even the old, scratched desks and the high ceilings reminded me of a youth reading Homer in buildings without air conditioning.

Maybe it's also that I'm so old, or my memories are distorted, that education was held to such a different light than it is in so many people I encounter today. Learning was priceless, a strange religion, strangely divorced from the realities of everyday life and certainly not thought to be preparation for the world of work. You drank learning in all its uselessness and then figured out everything else afterword. It's so different now, or maybe it isn't, but I was proven wrong; my useless education proved immensely useful down the road. And perhaps most wonderfully of all, in that space of time I attained a beautiful relationship with education, treasuring it and hoping to continue it throughout my life.

And then the bits of Russian that the older men spoke, which I have so completely forgotten, but I remember enough to catch scraps of what people are talking about when they are discussing small things. When I hear Spanish or French or Russian, I can catch the scraps and pin them down and get the gist of what people are saying. "A little bit of this... no, not that..." Ashamed for not mastering more than two or three languages, but I still have time, right? So many people I know can rattle out four or five languages fluently, some so violently unrelated as to make the task impossible, like five dialects of Chinese versus english, but they do it anyway.

All these girls materialized at once, and then the barrier was broken, and the men volunteered to show us where the bathroom was, and how to read chess notation. There were seriously ancient magazines in the bookshelf from the 1970s. After failing miserably at chess, I learned the basics of chess notation; I had been lazy in middle school, where played chess in our classes, and my strategy is weak, flinging pawns everywhere. They reviewed the notation with me; we followed a chess match of two famous men somewhere in Amsterdam last week, torn out of a section of the San Francisco chronicle.

When I went to the bathroom it was just like those really old New York City buildings. It's so strange, everything is so old there, even more old-fashioned than Europe, where so many buildings are so modern and strangely Californian. I don't think west coast people realize how old-fashioned heaters are in New York City, how the radiators would rattle and make your room so hot you'd have to open the window in the winter. In my apartments here the walls are paper-thin. I half-expected the toilet to be flushed with a chain, and connected patterns out of the hexagonal tiles on the floor, washed my hands with old-fashioned faucet handles turned all the way.

Cool girls annhilate you in chess; i was eaten alive.
When we ran down the staircase with its worn-down wooden rail, I thought of those days, so long ago, running down similar staircases with heaps of books in my arms, back when no all students had laptops. I would like to play chess more often now, I thought, maybe over the computer. People play those sorts of things online nowadays for free, against housewives in India or Iran, maybe not as beautiful as playing in a gigantic room full of people where you can stow your pawns aways in cubbies and press your fingers against felt chess pieces hanging against the wall.