Dad knows how to build a lot of stuff. Houses. Furniture. Outdoor showers. Lighthouses. Cannons. Most of these things you have probably already seen— and if you haven’t, then it is well worth your time to drop into the Shipyard to say hello. But this story is about something a bit smaller in scale. It’s about this fantastic chess board that’s been hanging out in our living room and collecting dust since it was finished in 2012.The story of the board is in itself a real treasure. The wooden squares are pieces of the original hull of Old Ironsides (a generous gift from the Museum’s Curator back in 1981 when Dad donated to the museum a replica he’d made of the Raging Eagle gun). The opposing squares contain a combination of two types of stone. On one half of the board are squares made from Parthenon scraps (NB: Dad himself didn’t swipe these pieces— he discovered them in New England years after a certain “Relative X” pocketed them from Athens back in the 60s). The other half are pieces of marble procured from a quarry in Italy that would reportedly have been used to source Coliseum materials. On the side with the Italian marble Dad carved “Roman” — on the Parthenon side he carved “Greek”…effectively setting up a battlefield for the two armies.

As for the wood serving to frame the entire board, Dad got that came from the Falmouth dump. So this time and distance-spanning chessboard sat around collected dust for about five years. It wasn’t because there was far more interesting things flashing on our oversized TV. Rather, it was because Dad had run into a dilemma. He wanted equally nice chess pieces to match his board, but he didn’t have the resources on-hand to create what he wanted. As it turns out, the answer lay right down the street. We’ve got neighbors that must have a magic lathe in their garage because when I came home on this visit I was greeted by a set of gleaming and weighty chess pieces that were just begging to be played. Dad was just finishing them up, devoting much care and precision to affixing footpads onto each piece. All the while doing his, he kept remarking about how he wanted other people to play— because he himself didn’t know how. I think I allowed Dad to mention his chess disability about six times before I finally threw up the Bullshit Flag. “Dad,” I said on afternoon while digging into a tub of Nor’easter Pothole ice cream, “You can fly airplanes, you can build cannons, you put up with having five kids…but not you’re telling me that you can’t learn how to play chess?” Dad looked up from his X-Acto knife. “Yuh!,” he said with certainty, “but those things are easy!” I looked right at him and then glanced out the window at our backyard lighthouse composed of brick. I could still see halfway up the one part that bulged out slightly. I had helped work on that part. So with all of this information in my brain I put down my ice cream spoon and went into the living room. I was about to change Dad’s tune on chess.One of the last times I played this game of strategy was back in the 90s while in Krakow. I was backpacking with a friend of mine and we each bought a folding board and pieces that were for sale on the streets. With plenty of time to kill and a sense of endless possibility, we elected to play a round or two. I lost each time. It wasn’t until we got to the final checkmate that my good friend confessed that she was once the Tennessee state chess champion. Uh huh. It might not have been the same as being coached by Jim Belushi, but after that ego-bruising experience, I retired from amateur chess competition. Now, some 20 years later, I was ready to dust off my knowledge and teach Dad the fundamentals.As I walked him through the functions of each piece, Dad quickly absorbed the rules. The easiest thing about chess is the actual learning to play. As soon as we got underway, I was no longer the teacher as we settled into a comfortable existence of  blind leading the blind. I will however say that Dad has had in his possession an old book on chess that he picked up in 1984 at an O’Hare Airport used bookstore (back when such a thing could exist in an airport). Even before I forced an inaugural game on him, he would sit at the kitchen counter and read the old pages like a disciplined student. He was more than ready to play.The thing about the Hallinan brain is that it is a pretty flat and expansive surface. Kind of like our massive kitchen table island. At any one time we have many projects going on and growing in different directions. Dad will be busy putting together another custom made wooden box. I’ll be making kilos of chocolate chip cookie dough for freezing. My brother will be detailing away and inhabiting another universe as he completes a custom order from his Etsy website. Because there are always a million things going on at once, it is pretty much guaranteed that we’re bouncing between multiple activities. I’m telling you this because the chess game between Dad and me— it didn’t get played in one sitting. It was more like a dozen up and down rounds, where each of us did our best to strategize…or cheat (just look back at that bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips a few photos up— you’ll see that Dad tried to hide my queen).So right now I have to go and sand some window trim and also maybe put coat of white paint on the kitchen wall. Dad, ever since the days of black and white, has been keeping us busy doing all kinds of projects. But this current break in the blog entry kind of makes sense, because this morning while I was standing in the kitchen and plotting my next move, Dad announced that we needed to make lobster rolls. The shelled lobster meat was sitting in the fridge, and Dad was looking at me to make lunch happen. Chess would have to wait. So part two of this battle between Age & Treachery (the 80 year old) and Youth & Skill (the 40 year old) will have to wait until the lobster rolls are done.  Stay tuned. Before you know it, two of us will no longer be hungry, and only one of us will be crowned chess champion.