I taught my ten-year-old grandson Michael to play chess about six months ago. We sat at my kitchen table and played lots of games. I won them all. It never crossed my mind to let him win. I enjoyed feeling like a Grandmaster chess player, even if I was beating a ten-year-old child who’d never played before. Chess is a tough game. If he was going to learn to play, he needed to pay attention to the whole board and think beyond his current move, something I knew he would eventually do better than I ever could.

But a Grandmaster I’m not. I liked chess as a child, but I stopped playing when I was about thirteen. I was no good at the game because I could never think beyond a couple of moves. I never learned the higher-level strategies. I never thought or talked about the board in terms of numbers and letters. When I played against my sister or neighborhood friends, I won occasionally, but as I got older, my game didn’t mature, and I lost a lot of games. For me chess was no longer fun. I hung up my pieces and moved on.

So, when I sat at the kitchen table six months ago, beating my grandson in game after game, I enjoyed it because I knew it wouldn’t last. He is good at puzzles and games. He can read diagrams and build three-dimensional objects from many types of building sets. He can skip the directions and design his own creations. He watches YouTube videos to learn how to do things.

My grandson is eleven now. He has been playing chess with friends and watching friends play chess. He has learned some strategies. He thinks about his moves before he makes them. He thinks two or three moves ahead. I’ve started playing chess with him again.

We play in the front living room. He sets the chess board up on the coffee table and pulls up the ottoman. I sit opposite him on the couch.

Words between us are few. Chess is a quiet game. We watch each other contemplate moves. We think about our next moves. We work on seeing the whole board. There is no room for small talk. Sometimes one of my younger grandsons will come up to us and start talking. I put my hand up and say, “Michael and I are playing chess, and it takes all of our concentration. We can’t talk and think about the game at the same time.” They stop mid-sentence and back away, but in five minutes or less, one of them will forget and try to talk to us again.

My chess-playing grandson and I are evenly matched, for now. Our games last around twenty minutes. It’s a coin toss as to who will win. I give the game my all, but I don’t care if I win or lose because the victories are never lopsided. But I suspect in another year or two, my grandson will have upped his game again. My only strategy against him might be that I have no strategy, thereby creating chaos on the board.

My favorite part of playing chess with my grandson is the quiet camaraderie we share as we stare at the pieces and the board, each of us trying our best to win. And with four grandkids in the house, it gives me the perfect excuse to be left in peace and quiet for twenty minutes in the afternoon. I tell the other grandkids that barring an emergency, I’m not to be disturbed. And if they try, I hold up my hand and repeat, “Michael and I are playing chess.”

Memories don’t always have to be filled with words.