The Game
It's gonna be a chilla and a killa
On a hot summer’s day a couple of weeks ago, I stood on a large grassy field under the shade of an elm tree and watched as a woman and her eleven-year-old daughter played chess on a life size board set up on a patch of concrete nearby. My son and his friends—crouched on their heels like they were shooting dice—huddled together on one side, watching. We were there for a week-long music camp, and every afternoon after orchestra practice he and his compadres took a straight shot to the chess set, ready for action.
The match would begin. The boys watched, muttering among themselves, and kept up an unsolicited but steady stream of advice. It reminded me of street chess in Washington Square—old men talkin’ trash, doin’ the hustle.
The woman stood, arms folded, considering her next move.
“What are you doing? Not there!”
“Time to Castle!”
“Nice move.”
Occasionally she nodded, still looking at the board. Her opponent just ignored them.
One of my son’s music teachers came to stand under the elm tree. He’d been my teacher too, at a few of these summer camps, when I was three, four, five. He didn’t remember me, but he remembered my mother. We talked about things that weren’t music. It was nice to have a break. We talked New Mexico, where he lives part time. We talked Taos and Ramah and Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We talked Gila, and badlands, and camping. He told us how his husband, a flautist, hates camping, and how he made him go anyway, saying “it’s car camping! It’ll be easy!” and took him way out to Chaco Canyon, and it wasn’t.
“I hate camping too,” I said, “but I pretend not to.”
“Careful now!” yelled my son from the sidelines. We watched the match.
At dinner a six-year-old talked to me about God. We had been discussing outer space and black holes and our universe and other universes and we were trying our best to fathom it all and it was fun and completely unfathomable but then he said “it’s ok not to understand because we do know that God invented everything… he made something out of nothing!” which honestly seemed like a cop-out, theory-wise. Why not just leave it unfathomable? But every time we went back to talking he did it again. He did it the next day at breakfast, and lunch, and dinner… I kind of wished he would leave God off the table, but he was six, so I just raised my eyebrows and said “oh wow!” Owen Wilson style, and helped myself to more potatoes.
After dinner the kids ran and ran through the long grassy fields and scrambled up and down the dry creek banks while I thought about rattlesnakes and poison oak and asthma. I always think about rattlesnakes and remind my kid to think about them too. He doesn’t but I do because of the time a couple of years ago when I was sitting on a bench watching him and his friend play in a creek bed. After a while I heard a rustling sound and looked down to see a slow fat rattlesnake who had come off the hill behind me and was now making its way under the bench I was sitting on. It was completely unbothered that I was there, which was nice, and I hoped it would continue to be so. I stayed very still and watched as it cleared my legs, and then my feet, and made its slow fat way on down toward the creek. At which point I jumped up and started yelling, Run! Snake! or something to that effect. My son understood and ran—up the opposite bank to the road, away from the snake, who was now in the creek and heading toward the other kid. The other kid finally began to run too—the wrong way. He was going straight toward the snake. By now his parents and James and Jesse and I were all screaming: No! Other way! Run! But he kept going, and exactly at what could only have been the last possible second, James, my hero, the hero, everyone’s hero, jumped from the road into the creek, just leapt through the air, six feet at least in a sideways motion—scooped up the kid and flew with him back up onto the road. His feet never seemed to touch the ground, just one fluid jump there and back and the kid was safe. I can’t explain because it didn’t seem real, but that’s what happened. You hear about it sometimes, the Herculean feat, a mother lifting a car. That’s what this was. The kid’s dad grabbed his kid and hugged him for a very long time and then he grabbed James and hugged him for a very long time and burst into tears.
At music camp Jesse scrambled around in the dry creek bed with his friends after dinner while I tried and failed to be chill.
“Watch out for snakes!” I yelled again.
“I know,” he yelled back.
“And poison oak!” I added, so as to seem fair.
Jesse was the life of the party at that camp. He ran and yelled and laughed louder than anyone has ever laughed when they’re running and yelling, and on the last night there when he was running and yelling and laughing he had a massive asthma attack, and we gave him albuterol, and it didn’t work, so we gave him more, and that did, and then it was time for bed.
Lovely flow.
Wonderful storytelling. And the ”so as to seem fair” made me smile.