Macbeth

My oldest son, Henry, has been on a chess jag lately, and has been playing in person at a chess spot in Greenwich Village called Chess Forum. This means that, aside from being subjected to a lot of in depth lectures on things like Alakhine’s Defense, gambits (there’s not just a Queen’s Gambit, it turns out), and the Sicilian Defense, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Village, myself.

I don’t mind.

Before this, I was the main person he was playing with, and he was slaughtering me on the regular and heckling me while he did it. It wasn’t until he first started playing chess (in elementary school) that I realized that I did not, as I’d always thought, know how to play chess. I knew how the pieces moved. There’s a difference.

I’m still at the same level I was at when he started playing, which is to say, I know how the tricky pieces move, though occasionally I still try to move a pawn like a checker. (No need to mock me, he has that territory covered.) Him, not so much. He’s improved in leaps and bounds. Once he’s in to something, he’s in with both feet.

Yesterday, I made the trip down with him just to keep him company and he asked me to wait around so we could do dinner when he was done, which resulted in me cooling my heels (literally, it was a little chilly) at the outdoor seating set up for my favorite bone broth place down there, and praying I had enough juice on my phone to keep my Kindle app alive for a while.

I hate being caught without a book. In the old days, pre-Kindle, I was the kind of person who always carried a large-ish tote and several books at a time, because I never knew what I’d be in the mood to read. Kindle changed my life (and relieved a lot of shoulder strain).

On this day, as I scrolled through my library, I settled on Macbeth. I don’t know why. It was a mood thing. I like Shakespeare’s dark stuff better than his comedies. And I’m particularly partial to the opening scene because I find the witches infallibly creepy.

I realized, to my surprise, that I’ve read this scene so many times that I’ve memorized it. Which is how I started thinking about my brother.

One of the things I’ve been talking with my parents about lately is my brother’s insane memory. And his tendency, (which runs in my family) to take a deep dive into things that interest him.

Two of the subjects of his deep dives: Poe and Shakespeare. I’m not sure how he got on to either of them. I’m hoping to connect with his former teacher. But, however he discovered them, he went all in.

I remember him reciting poems like The Raven, and Annabelle Lee, in their entirety. I also remember that I could open one of the poems, pick any line in it, read it out loud, and he’d pick up from there and continue on. At the time I remember being impressed. But, remember, he was also my older brother and he set the tone for what “older” looked like. I didn’t quite appreciate that this was not necessarily normal behavior for a 16-year-old, much less anyone.

My dad recently confirmed that he could do it with Shakespeare, too. Pick a play, pick a line somewhere in there, read it out loud…and he’d just continue on.

When he died, he’d been immersed in Romeo and Juliet. My mother had a passage from it engraved on his gravestone:

“…and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night…”

It kind of encapsulates a lot of how many of us felt about him. It also slays me every time I see it. It’s perfect.

My mother bought me a copy of the play after Ted died, because she said he’d made a note somewhere to have me read it. He took his curating of my reading list rather seriously. I read Jane Austen young, and it was because of him. I also read Jaws young, also because of him. That one scarred me for life as, let’s face it, he knew it would. (He was not above being a jerky older brother, despite all the nice things I write about him.)

It occurred to me, as I was sitting there, that there was another bit of Macbeth I knew by heart. It’s the Tomorrow speech, at a point in the play when (I think, it’s been awhile) Macbeth’s wife is dead, and he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop on all his treacherous behavior.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

It’s a passage FULL of time. The slow, tedious pace of it, the emptiness of it…the meaninglessness of it. I find it fascinating. I once saw Ian Mckellen do a one man show called Acting Shakespeare in which he took that speech apart, paced it out, like a metronome, walking, as he spoke it, to emphasis just how heavily Macbeth felt the burden of time.

It made me think of the way my brother spent his time in the hospital. Doing things like mastering the guitar, or memorizing loads of Shakespeare. Left with time, and not much else to do, he could have gotten pissed, or shut down.

But he turned to the things that lit him up, instead. Found his joy, if you will. Took the deep dive. It’s pretty impressive for a then 9-year-old to weigh what was in front of him and make that choice. And it was definitely a choice. It’s something I loved about him, and this deep dive tendency, which I’m seeing in my older son, is something I really like about my family.

It has occurred to me, many times, that someone whose joy was to run around and play soccer would have had a harder time surviving the way my brother did in the room. That, being an introvert, and smart, and able to focus intensely on things that interested him, he was, if anyone is, well suited to his confinement.

And, of course I think about this past year, during the pandemic, in which some people took to hobbies with a vengeance. Baking. Knitting. Languages.

What choices do we make, when faced with adversity? With confinement? So many choices, when it’s easy to think you have none. We were all living a version of his life, to some degree, this year. What choices did we make?

My brother isn’t the only one who’s faced this on some level. There’s Anne Frank. There’s Malcolm X, when he was in jail…Countless others whose names haven’t made it to the cover of books, so we don’t know their stories.

I was kind of ticked at the people who took up hobbies with a vengeance during the pandemic, to be honest. I was envious. I have a full-time job that, because I cover health as a journalist, got busier, and I had two kids who were attempting to go to school online (which was frankly awful), to name just a couple of my responsibilities.

I had less time than ever. But I found myself wanting to dig in to the time, the isolation, to do what my brother did. As we ease out of the pandemic, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity. I know that sounds odd. I’m not at all endorsing the continuation of the pandemic so that I might pursue my hobbies.

But…I want to immerse. I want to make the choice to grow during adversity. It’s a way of living I thoroughly endorse.

I know that I do make these choices, almost daily, in small ways, because of what I witnessed growing up. But I wish I had something more…a play memorized by heart, perhaps?…to show for it, sometimes. I am fond of the deep dive, myself. I come by it naturally.

Maybe there’s space in real life to find that again. Some balance between too much time, and not enough, to connect with what fires me up.

In the meantime, I watch my son, and I listen to him wax on (and on) about some or other chess defense he wants to learn to play against some opener, and I remember something I loved about my brother, and myself, and, unlike poor misguided Macbeth, I hope for more time to figure all this out.