TheBanyanTree: Crown Me, Brother (Flip That Cap Over)

[B Drummond]

I talked my son recently into playing me in a game of checkers.  

That was no easy task as he is young enough that he was introduced to most 
games via a computer and prefers to play games that are computer generated 
and have heavy, fast action with lots of graphics.  Card games and board 
games, for the most part, move too slow for him and don't have enough action 
to keep his attention.

He finally relented and we played a game.  That game took us both longer than 
we originally thought. 

Our game board was one I purchased this year from a Hobby Lobby store. It was 
a nice game board made of wood in the Orient with built in storage for the 
checkers. I added four rubber "feet" under it to keep it from getting 
scratched when moving it on a table and it served us well.  

While playing on it against my son it made me think of playing checkers in 
other times and places.

One of them was when I worked in Kenya in the early '90s.  My work associates 
loved to play checkers (they referred to them as draughts) and they played it 
using a hand drawn board, usually on a piece of wood big enough for the board 
grid, or they would paint or scribble one out on a table top, or a tree 
stump. For the game pieces they preferred beer bottle caps.  And most of the 
time one of those set of caps was from a bottle of *Tusker brand beer.    

Those Africans took their checkers seriously and had admiration for anyone 
that played a good game.  

I can still see them now, the players sitting in high backed chairs, or on 20 
liter plastic pails around a stump sawed flat and a checker board grid 
painted or carved into the top.

A crowd would form around the players and would study each move carefully, 
laughing sometimes and whispering to each other when a player made a big 
mistake or made a move they didn't anticipate.  They'd be eating **ugali and 
***nyama choma and washing it down with Tusker beer.   

In the part of Africa I was in checkers was like a national pastime.  It was 
more than a game between two players.  There it was a spectator sport for as 
many as could crowd around a table of players and see what was happening on 
the board.

My son and I battled hard and played for more than an hour, both measuring 
each move and prospective move the best we could. 

Finally the game ended when he pinned my last man in a corner.  By that time 
he also had me outmanned 3 to one.   

I surrendered with mixed emotions.  

He had won and enjoyed the game, especially so in that he beat his father in 
the game. 

That made me happy, especially after all the cajoling it took to get him to 
play.  

But losing, well, I wasn't thrilled with that.  

And  finally, one other one:

thankfulness 

thankfulness for being able to spend some time with him that we both enjoyed 
from start to finish

and for bringing back a memory of a place and time and some wonderful people 
that I had not thought of for quite some time.


* http://tinyurl.com/yw9w7p

** http://www.whats4eats.com/recipes/r_br_ugali.php

*** http://tinyurl.com/27w9g8


  bd
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