“I had a strong premonition that the big rollover was going to be an omen. An omen of how the rest of my life would turn out; how I would face the larger events. I wanted to do something grand—be in a club or bar or rave and shout the countdown with drunken comrades, usher in the new millennium with hooliganish ecstasy.

Instead my friends dropped out on me to watch ABC’s coverage of the ball dropping. I ended up at a friend’s house watching movies and having assorted shots of alcohol. As they began counting down, however, I realized how I could not damn myself to a future of watching other people have fun on television. I couldn’t understand how watching a massive celebration on television is better than being in that same massive celebration. Real time.

I left, out the front door at the stroke of midnight and began walking home, from Anaheim to Whittier. That's really far if you don't know. Both Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm are in Anaheim so as I walked the fireworks from their celebrations lit up the night sky. I passed a church where they were singing religious songs with rambunctious fervor. I passed a goat farm, probably the only goat farm in Anaheim, CA. My brother picked me up in Fullerton and took me home. At least I wasn’t watching tv.”
- In response to Hope, January 1 2000

A decade ago, amidst the euphoria of a new millennium, with all my hopes in the air, hopes which could only be disappointed in part, I began a lonely walk from Anaheim to Whittier. I wanted a televised event and what I got was the sound of my footsteps and the cars zooming past me as I walked toward my undersized apartment. I got my brother, who picked me up just shy of Malvern, who knew I would have spent the whole night walking without him to rescue me.

Last night just after midnight I repeated the process which is now ritual: a trip outside, thoughts of who I have become and what another year, or decade, has done to me. My trip, with the temperature submerged below freezing along a snow canvassed path, was necessarily short but the discomfort was so synchronous to the feelings in my heart that it seemed somehow orchestrated in the long span of things.

The discomfort was synchronous and warranted. What other feeling can accompany a year of so severe a loss? What can be thought in such circumstance? That God is with me, that He loves me, I am well aware but is He not also with me outside in that cold and darkness, as my fingers experience the sharp prickles of the weather through my gloves, as my breath is drawn in short, quick pulls and my nostrils, seemingly bewildered by the harsh winter air lose faculty and begin to secrete their contents?

My intuition all that time ago proved correct: the pattern I established for a new year, indeed a new millennium, would be a cyclical journey for each year’s end and beginning. What I couldn’t know that night ten years ago as I walked away from my friends in search of a higher ideal that I had so carefully crafted over the years, was that walking alone with broken daydreams was a foreshadowing a night a decade later when I’d walk alone with reality, not daydreams, broken around me.

One year ago I shared part of the night with my daughter. There was not a part of my future I could separate from her; she was the object of the hopes which I’d allowed to recede for myself. It was a real and direct transfer; there was nothing I could imagine for her that I wouldn’t obtain as much satisfaction (even less!) in wanting for myself. I had begun to realize parts of her being that I hadn’t preconceived, discoveries that I understand now are what make parents so proud and mystified by their children. She was beautiful beyond the subjectivity of my emotion as a father. Her feet were dainty miniatures of my own. As she found her voice, she would make her sounds to the delight of her mother and I; conversations of love on the living room floor.

Now that she is gone, the hope I’d transferred is still with her. I encounter it when I visit the cemetery, when I find myself looking at its evidence in the portrait etched on her stone. I can’t be there without encountering that feeling of loss in an acute, almost tactile sense. Sometimes it is in the silence. Sometimes it’s in the noise of crows I can see in my peripheral gaze. Sometimes it is in the sound of the wind. Sometimes it is in looking at my wife who returns the look with an understanding that neither of us put out in the open: we will spend the rest of our lives bereft because all we had is with our little girl, wherever and however she now exists.

My decade started after midnight, listening to my footfalls in a cathedral of quiet, freezing cold. Now I find myself anonymous, unknown more than a hundred miles away. If ever an epoch could begin from a sunken place, this is it. Although my intuition about the omen of beginnings is still with me, it can be said that I’m starting things with a heart that, although damaged, has not given up completely. I start with the love of my wife as we exchange places picking one another up in our journey together, tightly bound by our loss. It begins with the paradox of God’s love, which is still true even when life feels like the air outside in a Dakotan January. I cannot tell you how I know that, but I do. So firmly do I believe that I’m willing to stake the life, and death, of my daughter upon it.

Omaha, NE
January 1, 2010

I was 13 at the time that this all started. My youth and its accompanying energy abounded as I bounced my rubber ball on an outdoor tarmac court, new to the game and new to the introspection that being there would give me in life. When school was out I felt compelled to practice, to dribble and imagine my opponents confounded expressions as I effortlessly evaded their attempts to contain me. I would jump and feel time slow down as the ball made its way from my fingertips towards its ultimate goal. God makes us for things and I had hope that my lanky frame had special reasons for being a smaller proportioned version of the college kids I would watch on TV.

Then I was 16 and the reason I was practicing alone was because I’d played past the point that everyone else wanted to – I’d regress into that old form of imagination I’d developed in my first teenage year. I’d have the ball and shoot it from 25 feet away thinking as it arced its way down “she loves me, she loves me not” and wait for the inevitable: my victory over odds, a perfect concoction of love and basketball. I skipped lunch on schooldays because my dreams were enough sustenance.

All that time, all those dreams.

By the time I am 28 I know my dreams were about something else. My Achilles tear is two years past and although I can still play other things go wrong. Competitive play seems to always lead to some form of injury so I relegate myself to simple practice; shooting around like I did when I first learned the game. When I get to a court and allow myself to drift into the past it’s amusing because I can’t connect what hope that teenager had with my current state except to bemoan feeling old. I can’t help but do it anyway – it’s my best time of Introverted Thinking.

I’m 34 now writing after an evening spent absent mindedly shooting around on an empty basketball court when I’ve put the pieces together in an act of deliberate distraction the way Archimedes did when he was soaking in the tub before shouting eureka. I’m not shouting but the clarity with which things make sense is like the warmth of a car in the sun after a cold day. The irony is this: 21 years of playing alone has given me the coping mechanism with which I can think the daughter I lost. It’s the one place I can let physicality offload my reasoned thinking and memory, shifting my mind into the sort of cruise control of repetitive motion and exercise. If God made us for things so trivial as a game like basketball, He wasn’t thinking as I was of the ability to make the kind of undeniable beauty the gifted evoke; He was evolving the companion He would give me for the grief I’d live with when I was no longer young

So I shoot the basketball and think about belief and about how we conceptualize the act of believing. In the dark corner of spacetime that I occupy, what do I believe about religion, afterlife, and my daughter Lael? Will I see her again?

Within the tradition of Protestantism I’ve grown up in there are the devotees of Swiss theologian John Calvin who propound a great theme of God’s sovereignty and choice: that He knows we can never choose holiness (turning from sin, redemption from the bad through the death of Christ) and as an act of His own grace selects those who will realize their sin and inability to desire Him. Do I believe I will see her again in a Christianized conceptualization of heaven, I wonder, because I can’t accept alternatives as an act of divine will?

A good Calvinist¹ would nod and find themselves opening their Bible back to passages that comfort them in the book of Romans, psychologically accosting themselves for the evil they harbor and feeling all the better for realizing their Total Depravity because doing so gives them more gratitude when they consider God’s act of grace in saving them, in making believers of them.

Swish. Clang.

I’m chasing the ball back and forth allowing a crescendo of play to coincide with the feeling stirred up in my heart. I think of how, like my old dreams, the intellectual arguments for belief used to be so real to me. They mean nothing to me now in my present state. It would be like my meeting the girl I had a crush on when I was 13 and playing basketball for the first time now that I’m in my middle thirties: we’d look at each other, bemused at how time, weight, and life have made of us creatures we couldn’t imagine as youngsters. The past is relevant only in that we knew each other and that’s why we recognize our present day selves.

I was reading earlier this week about Mother Teresa and what some call a crisis of belief. She wrote once to a confidant:

"Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand."

To another:

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

Yet she continued her work. Yet she continued her public profession of faith. I understand what for her was little to do with feeling and everything to do with the grit of a personal choice because I now find myself doing the same thing: deciding my belief in the absence of emotion and reason. She wasn’t always like that; before starting her work in Indian slums she felt witness to direct encounters with Jesus, both vivid and concrete. But that was before forgotten people, poverty, and most importantly death took hold of her life as her ministry took her to these states of being which most “normal” people take care to avoid².

I wonder if it isn’t because death under some circumstances, although natural, defies our sensibility in a way that removes our old friends of emotion and reason a place in ordering our world. There’s the distant and vague death that we can accept and there’s the death that leaves us bereft of all that we can care for like the old Ukrainian man we see crying at his wife’s grave each day.

As the crescendo unravels and I feel my body getting tired – the shots I make are all short because I’m no longer using my legs to help with the energy to project the ball towards the hoop. I’ve got to do one more thing before I leave. From 35 feet away I take a few dribbles and then shoot saying in my heart “she loves me, she loves me not” – she no longer a vague woman of my destiny but instead my daughter Lael to whom any worthwhile effort of mine I now dedicate.

Swish.

I’m almost done but there’s a new part to the ritual of leaving. One more shot, same spot, this time my heart whispering “she hears me, she hears me not.”

The ball goes into the basket with a resonating thud from the back of the rim and I can go home.

¹Ironically neither was Calvin a “Calvinist” nor was Luther a “Lutheran.”  More here.
²Mother Teresa has many critics. I find telling the difference between how each responded to seeing trauma and suffering. Perhaps her most vocal critic, Christopher Hitchens, wrote the following after seeing chaos in northern Uganda:

“I… tried not to notice the hundreds of other eyes that were hungrily turned toward me in the darkness, wondered what the hell the actual politicians, here or there, were doing… , and managed to get out of the night encampment just before the equatorial rains hit and washed most of the tents and groundsheets away.”

Reading last year’s birthday post reveals to me what a different state of mind I occupied in this short span of a year. Here’s what I thought: life is in a steady grind, I work at BigCo, my wife is pregnant, and I’m going to sail kicking and screaming (for effect) into the sunset of the life of a salary man. I’m going to make a big show of both the sacrifice and joy it is to be a father; I’m going to figure it out and explain it to my friends who are afraid of the prospect of children. I’m going to give up the notion of grad school and be more practical (safe) since I’m not going to have time for frivolity. My child is going to be, despite all the odds, a rampant success, a fulfillment of his or her parent's deferred dreams, hopes, visions, wishes, etc and etc.

Now things are different. Derailed. Demolished. I’m turning 34 in a few minutes and what I have to show for it is a kind of emptiness that is created when life that is full is drained. The child I planned would take me so many places is gone. I wake up each day with that realization, a steadily sinking one that becomes more real with each passing minute: a fuzzy notion that everything is wrong, a dreadful nagging about rare misfortunes, a concrete realization when I see her little ballerina socks on my end table, and then a depressing wall when I’m up and trying to remember what it felt like to take on a day with the innocence of hope.

I don’t have much to show for turning 34 at all except that amazing experience of being a father being given and taken away.

This is the part where I’m supposed to write about the little sliver of hope, or about God, perhaps quoting a verse or two. “What a heartwarming struggle!” you might say to yourselves and then next year I’ll have a pleasant confirmation of that little sliver of hope I wrote about on my previous birthday. The road through shadows and death will have come out to a pristine oasis of a deeper self.

It might be so. Check back in a year and I might have all those wonderful things to share. I’m old enough and tired enough to accept that storyline.

But right now the thing that is inexorable is that the struggle and hurt I’m writing about here in vague terms has a name – her name is Lael. She was beautiful. She cried a lot but we could usually calm her down by bouncing on an exercise ball. I’d hold her sometimes when she slept and when she was awake she’d play with a toy that would play the same songs over and over – songs that many a nonparent would find annoying but which I would give anything to hear again now. She would fall asleep in the baby swing with her head always cocked to her left. She had long eyelashes. I fed her a bottle on most nights. She didn’t sleep through the night for a long time and when she finally did, Kristin and I were so happy. I was exhausted all the time but I was happy. I made two big realizations that I’ll always hang onto: that of all the creations I dream up in the totality of my imagination, she was the best thing I will ever attribute to myself, and that no man knows his capacity to love until he has children.

So here’s to 34, being broken, and to the daughter I lost on father’s day.

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
- David Foster Wallace, “Federer as Religious Experience”

“Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic – in a word, moral – undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.”
- George Will, “Men At Work”

The play is broken.

A referee has blown a whistle just before Derrick Fisher passes the passes the ball to Lamar Odom. Odom, who having anticipated the space and time to make his move unopposed, continues anyway, and with a single motion, palms the basketball.

Palming, or holding a basketball with a single hand, fingers stretched around the curves of the ball, requires large hands and finger dexterity. If you go to your local basketball court you should see someone working on palming the ball as though it’s a half conscious attempt to copy the move that Odom is about to make. A person with smaller hands must rely on having enough finger dexterity to palm the ball although it doesn’t take much to dislodge the ball: too much motion with the hand, a defending person tapping the ball while it’s in their fingers, or even simply time as the fingers lose their grip from sweat or fatigue.

When Odom catches the ball with his left hand, his body is facing the side of the court about 6 feet from the basket. A fraction of a second after the catch, making the motion seem simultaneous with the catching and palming of the basketball, he jumps toward the basket, turning his body the 90 degrees clockwise it needs to be facing the hoop directly. This is a natural turn for him since he’s left handed just as right handed players find it easier to rotate counter clockwise while jumping. Odom not only has great leaping ability, the quickness with which he can do it makes his play like that of a smaller player. This is remarkable and even in the NBA, a rarity for any player at 6’10”.

In college, we had a player for our team named “Big Mike.” Mike was 6’10”, like Odom, and since our school played in a lower level league than larger universities, it was rare that he played against players of equal size. It was not infrequent to see Big Mike play against players who only could stretch to 6’5” – a full 5 inches shorter. Although this paper advantage could have translated to his exploitation of opponents on the court, he had a cardinal weakness. He had a terrific problem with jumping. In layup drills, where a player dribbles the basketball, unopposed, towards the hoop and “lays it up” or makes an effort to put the ball in the hoop, he would often try to dunk (throw the ball downwards through the hoop by jumping high enough that his hands were over it), barely able to stretch his hands over the empty basket. Although it was comical at the time, it’s a truism that players of that size often have a hard time with the coordination it takes to plant their feet and jump.

Dale Brown, one time LSU coach, remembering his first meeting with Shaquille O’Neal, the self described “most dominant big man to play the game,” said that O’Neal showed up to a basketball camp when he was 13 years old, at 6’9” asking how he could improve his vertical jump. His problem at the time was similar to Big Mike. Even in his senior year of high school basketball, his vertical jump was a mere 16”. Unlike Big Mike, at whom we would find ourselves laughing in puzzlement as he tried to jump the few inches it would take to dunk, he was able to overcome this in college, improving it to 42”.

Odom’s jump now has him in mid-air, facing the basketball hoop. The basketball he has palmed is stretched up, at an angle as his back arches, a windup maneuver that belies his intent: it looks like he’s going to slam dunk the basketball with as much force as he can when his body snaps forward from its arched state into the angled form players usually assume for a slam dunk from that distance. This posture of the body was seen, in almost perfect form, in the 1988 dunk contest when Dominique Wilkins threw himself a lob to himself off the backboard – so perfect, in fact, that it contributed to his defeat of Michael Jordan and the title of the NBA dunk champion.

But Odom doesn’t dunk. His body snaps forward but he brings the ball, still palmed in his left hand, around in a wide arc, above the rim, almost dropping it to fall through the net from above except that he lets it roll off his fingers, a casual flip of the ball into the hoop.

It is Plato’s theory of ideals brought to life. In the way that Plato believed that our minds conceive a perfection that is only approximated in real life with varying shades of integrity, Odom is closer to the ideal that the observer can conceive, a form that defines the imperfection of what kids do on basketball courts everywhere: palming the ball, feigning dunks, practicing layups and the “finger roll.” It’s what makes us human: to share this ideal, a thing we can name and not define like love, justice, or beauty, and yet in common grasp for it in our lives even if the world can only offer us a tainted version.

The play is broken, so the casual observer and most players are not watching. After the ball goes through the hoop and the referee waves off the basket, Odom catches the ball and after he makes a quick bounce the referee, whistle in mouth, with his hands up and out making it seem like he is answering “ten” to some fictitious question, gestures that he needs the basketball to restart play with a pass from out of bounds. In the way that we walk by fall leaves, or that we look askance a perfect flower petal in landscaping, or ignore the night sky when it’s full of stars, the players forget and finding their positions for the next play, set up to continue.

I. Finding

I made it a point to visit a few bookstores in New York. My favorite given the limited time I had was Book Court, which I visited twice. The first visit was a glance in the window; reconnaissance during the lunch hour of the conference I was attending as I tried to map its location during daylight. I crossed Adams, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel and turned onto Court Street, hoping that I was going in the right direction.

II. Walking

Walking in Brooklyn is unique to my urban experience in America. In Los Angeles I did a lot of walking from where I parked. In San Francisco my walks up and down the hilly city were accompanied by other tourists looking at their maps and pointing towards points of orientation. When it wasn’t tourists, it was workers since most of my walks were in the financial district. Even in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury I had a feeling most of the people I walked by were externals, like me. In places like Kansas City walks are designed, an imposition of walkability in an otherwise sprawled cityscape. Even in Manhattan the walk felt different for one principle reason: to walk in Brooklyn is to be surrounded by its inhabitants. That’s how I felt walking south on Court Street passing fruit stands, flower shops, and local restaurants.

III. Singing

It was later that evening when I started back. Evening had the same magic to it that had sparked my interest at midday. Although I might have been inclined to listen to music, I chose instead to just listen to the sounds of the city around me. It’s moments like that when I have the words of Walt Whitman’s poem I hear America singing come back to me and the clarity of my first experience with the words sits in firm contrast with being here. When I’d read it I always dreamed I’d be a part of the singing but I’m convinced that even American citizenship won’t bring me to a full immersion with the noises that reverberate from what fits into my conceptual imagination of this country: the people, the experience, the politics, the language, the place.

IV. Presence

The bookstore was everything I thought: new books, excellent range, well organized, and staff that subtly showed an awareness of your presence but left you alone to browse the shelves in peace. I overheard them talking about an in store reading – the “another one?” phrase revealing a sentiment that bordered between nonchalance and inconvenience. I wondered who it would be as I looked at the bookshelf on the far wall. There was a basement in the bookstore and finding my way upstairs after having a look I saw the author whose reading was shortly to ensue. She was tall both physically and as a presence, and as they waited for her publicist I took a step behind some different shelves to have a look.

V. Pedigree

Well educated, I guessed, pretty but not striking, part of the New York writing scene, and very young. She seemed to know I was studying her and performed the trick that confirmed her status as a well endowed member of The Scene, successful even if modestly so: she looked over me. She looked through me.

VI. Envy

I wondered about the book. I don’t often find envy but at that moment I thought of our differences. I thought about Biola, my alma mater, in its Real Housewives of Orange County context; wealthy suburban kids for whom college was either a fun detour into family life or spiritual seekers who chose it because it held the quaintness of spirituality with which they’d grown up. I thought about my house in South Dakota, the 1994 Buick Regal I drive, and the converted warehouse where I work. I thought about the doors at Yale, the walls around Harvard, and the way I’d felt like I could see but not be seen when I walked around either campus. I thought about driving down Highway 1 in New Jersey and turning right onto Washington Ave towards Princeton. As I crossed the bridge over Lake Carnegie, I could see crew teams practicing in the water. I loved the experience of putting a concrete experience to a fascination I’ve always had in good schools, the art of learning, and wondering at the people whose footsteps I would traverse at these institutions of merit. I hated how it made me dislike my past and question my own pedigree.

VII. Memoir

I wondered about the book and then found out it was a memoir. My curiosity vanished; I have a large tub in which I categorize memoirists, with a principle conclusion that neither am I that interested to write all about my life at book’s length nor am I interested in reading another person’s unless they are notable in some way. The Ivy League, I think, may qualify you to be envied, but it does not qualify you to be read. I didn’t wait for the reading to start though I did make a note of the name thinking I’d have to amuse myself by finding out what her shtick was in writing a memoir at such a young age.

I found out that evening while eating my box of takeout pizza that Sarah Manguso was named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Sunday Book Review and won Best Nonfiction Book for the Year from The San Francisco Chronicle. Awards include The Joseph Brosdky Rome Prize in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A Memoir?

VIII. Terrible, Sparse, Beautiful

The book is called The Two Kinds of Decay and it’s about a debilitating disease Sarah gets in her junior year of college – a rarity that is related to but not the same as Guillan-Barre called Chronic Idiopathic Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy or CIDP. The disease is as horrible as it sounds, and the book in its delicately crafted prose does not obscure the ordeal she went through before recovering.

It’s a memoir, to be sure, but the way the prose is that of a poet: words are not wasted, meter is evident, and you get as much out of the negative space of what’s unsaid as you do with each sentence. Pieces of it are better read aloud.

“… Think of spacetime , through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.”

I don’t read quickly but 20, then 30 pages turn as I read more into what happened. The writing is exquisite, the illness it describes so beautifully seems an equally exquisite torture.

The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.

For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn’t help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.

The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very slowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body.

By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.

But I’m just going to say if felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.

And then I realize the thing about writing, writers, and memoirs. Each time you put pen to paper you give a piece of yourself away. Just as our lives can shrink or expand with curiosity, what the writer gives grows in proportion to how much of themselves they put out for us to see. It comes neither with New York, nor with any institution of merit. It comes with a type of courage and sacrifice that is rare.

I should have stayed that day in Book Court and waited along with everybody else for the publicist. I should like to have known the cadence of the book as read aloud by its author whom I no longer envy but hold with a newfound respect.

When I rushed out into the street, a few blocks and a turn back to the confident framework of seeing a person that I’d made up in my head to represent the hobgoblins of my own foolish consistency, I missed the beauty of a person opening up for a rare conversation, the type that one pockets for a lifelong memory.

At least I have the book.

{

Both.

Oops. Should be posted on Metadeveloper, sorry kids.

}

I went back to the chess club last night. One fellow wearing a Ron Paul button had the delicate features and acne of a teenager, but his voice and comportment suggested him as an adult. I overheard him talking with someone about a failed bid for the South Dakota State Senate which convinced me that his look did belie his true age. The local county commissioner plays chess as well, and from what I saw his game is very strong; he was the state champion as a youngster. The Grandmaster stopped in but only for a few moments to discuss a tournament this Saturday. I wonder if I'll ever see him play anyone from the club; from what I observe chess protocol frowns upon the wasting of a Grandmaster's time.

But the Grandmaster's time and conversation were the irony: he was talking about his kids and wife, kvetching the way most normal people do: "I was busy... who's gonna watch the kids..." and so on. It's so strange to see a person in the mundane whose name only a week before you circled in the New York Times. It puts fame into a different light for those of us who pursue a modest amount: perhaps a name in a newspaper is even more sad than anonymity because it's a lie that you avoid the malaise of day-to-day living we all experience.

My best moment, however, was when the organizer of the chess club, Mr R, opened up and told me a little bit about his life. I'd played twice, losing the first game playing black¹ while being impatient, then having a complete collapse when my opponent, J, turned the board around and let me play white. J is a jolly fellow who managed to repeat the word "devastation" without sounding condescending. His matter of fact "I devastated you" description was as emotionally mute as a box score. After being left to ponder my "devastating move²" that lead to my "devastating loss," Mr R pulled up a chair. He gave me a chess puzzle which I failed miserably. It was a simple test of whether I could think more than one move ahead at a time.

Mr R revealed that he is a Chicago native and at the tender age of 5 was written up in The Tribune as a chess prodigy. He said "I didn't have the nickel it took to get from where I lived to the chess tournaments" and I took this on as a euphemism. Did his parents care? How rough were the times? I made my closer examination of his face seem casual and guessed he was in the waning years of his 70s. He continued, probably aware he'd got my attention, saying that after missing that opportunity for "a nickel" he fought in World War 2 which was more evidence that he was likely a youngster during the depression and the misfortune of that timing was what held him back from the game. During the war he said he played anyone he could and "never lost" a game of chess. He thought he was "pretty good" at the time and may have come back to the game, but he returned home to married life and children. Mr R's pivot point in life and chess was when he and his wife parted ways and it was in this aftermath that he started to play again, entering tournaments while he was in his 40s - the same type of tournaments he would have played when in as an adolescent if he'd had that nickel. I wonder what it's like to look at the precocious teenager on the other side of the board who is the younger form of you, the form that had the opportunity to play without the baggage of depression, war, and a failed marriage.

Whether he intended it or not, I think he was trying to tell me that he too had started late and with many obstacles. Earlier in the week he had called me to encourage me to come back to the chess club after I'd skipped a week. I offered the excuse of having an infant - my presumed carte blanche to invoke everyone's false sense that a family is an excuse not to play regularly, to put a pause button on the game so that life can go on. He didn't respond and we spent an uncomfortable moment listening to a white noise resembling the type of crackling you might hear on your television when there's snow.

Last night, after telling me about himself he gave me three magazines, recommending I start with Chess Life For Kids.

¹In chess, white always gets the first turn. This is a small advantage since you get a chance to control the tempo of the game in the first moves. What throws me off as much is that most of my books are from the white perspective so I'm just used to looking at things that way.

²Reading my chess book this morning I realized that there is a name for my bad play with black: "Damiano's Defense." Here is what Pandolfini says: "Other than resigning, or making a suicidal decision... this is practically the worst defense Black has."

Ory grew up in Nairobi, probably not too far from me. She's one of the New Africans for whom I'll keep my ears perked. By "New African" I mean a person who lives a life between Africa and the first world, educated here but with a heart and family that's left over... we aren't typical immigrants you see and in Ory's case, she went back to make a difference. You can see her talk at TED here, make sure you get past the Harvard name dropping to the meat of her message.