He Knew Chess

My friend liked to say that he did not know how to play chess.

This was not true. He knew how to play. The problem was that once I persuaded him to sit down at the board, he could spend so long thinking about one move that the game began to feel like a long-term project. Eventually I would lose patience and suggest that perhaps neither of us needed chess that badly.

That was one of many unnecessary facts I knew about him. We sometimes walked around without any purpose until, one day, he stopped and asked why we were walking around without any purpose. I had no answer. According to my memory, this ended our period of purposeless walking.

He also had a way of catching tiny fish with his hands. I remember the posture more clearly than I remember many important events: arms open, body slightly bent, hands low near the water, waiting in silence before closing them quickly. Friendship stores strange information. It remembers gestures that no biography would consider worth keeping.

There were other details. He sang often, read a great deal, wrote poems, watched documentaries, supported his football team, and had old habits that became jokes between us. At one point I copied an entire television series onto his computer, complete with subtitles, and he deleted it the next day because it occupied too much space. I considered this a personal insult.

None of these things describe a person in any formal way. They do not tell you where he worked or what he achieved. They tell you what it felt like to know him. That is different, and perhaps more useful.

The chess memory survives for the same reason. I do not remember who won any particular game. I remember persuading him to play, waiting for the move, becoming impatient, and finally giving up.

He knew chess.

He simply had his own way of making sure we rarely finished a game.