Checkmate

My father recently told me a story that set me back a bit. In a good way. Not so much a story I guess, but a profile. A case study in the determination of human communication. It goes like this:

Back in the years after the war, my Grandfather bought a house in Rutherford, NJ. My father couldn't remember the exact year, 'after the war' is his way of saying 'when I was young'. Perhaps it was 1949, he would have been about 12 or so.

The next door neighbor was a man from Switzerland, or at least my father thinks so. The man was quiet about his past. My father didn't ask too many questions on the subject as he didn't get too many answers. The years after the war were certainly a quiet time for many.

What originally caught my fathers eye about the man next door from Switzerland, was his penchant for carrying postcards around with him. A big pack of postcards, walking down the street, in a shop, at the post office. One day my father asked about the cards, and surprisingly he got an answer.

The man led my father into his house, and in the kitchen, on a foldout card table, were a dozen or so travel chess sets. Next to each chess set was a stack of the cards the man was always carrying around. Each card had a move on it and a representation of the state of the game it pertained to. The man was a serial chess player.

Each and every day he would send and receive cards from all around the world. Each card having little more than a move and a picture of a chessboard. Now there isn't anything else left in this story-study. The man kept applying his long distance strategies, my father began to formulate his own, and eventually my proto-family moved farther into the suburbs of New Jersey and my father never saw the man from Switzerland again.

So the next time you get on the Skypes or the Internets again take a moment to reflect on the core of what it is we do that makes us who we are. Our communications have always defined our existence. Talk, think, strategize... grow.