Long after the family was asleep, my father would put on his eyeglasses and mimic the moves made by grandmasters Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov on his own chess set so he could study their strategies. My father never finished ninth grade. 

In gray and leathered eld, 
The carpenter’s day is spelled, 
By the brilliance of the crackling hearth, 
And the sixty-four squares, 
He tries with might to chart.