Anniversary

"And miles around they'll say that I / Am quite myself again."

-- A. E. Housman, "XVIII" in A Shropshire Lad

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I found Ajax, squatting with his pudgy butt of curls nastying up a chess set, chomping on a white bishop. It's the last of a litany of things I've had to swipe from his jaws: candy wrappers, dirty undies, chocoloate mints, a pair of sandals, and a running total of eight socks. When you're home alone with the dog, you are zookeeper and nanny and thief, and maybe automatic pitching machine and reconnaissance drone, too. It makes me wonder what kind of father I'll be, when the cute little being in my charge has logic and wit on top of sass, decibels and instinct.

Ajax just found a shard of the last biscuit I gave him, and is merrily gnawing away. Today's tiny victory.

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Dad made that chess set, incidentally, in high school. It was his senior wood-shop project. Each piece he carved and painted by hand, the squares he stained and set and shellacked until smooth. The whole contraption (the board itself serves as a kind of lid for a box on legs) has moved with us everywhere. It was originally a gift for his mom, but because she had no room and never played, she begged him to take it back once he had a wife and kids. Apparently the box separates from the stand, but I've never seen that happen. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey's black monolith, the set has simply been there, through every move, guarding our living rooms like a rook.

We use it for storage, mostly. Board games and Mom's scrapbooks fit nicely in the box, and unless someone is actually using the playing surface for a game, it becomes a kind of open-air junk drawer. Right now, compliments of the house pup, the black army lies wounded and scattered, framing a discarded notebook and a deck of cards (still in a perfect stack, curiously). As I look at the carnage on the board, I remember where the notebook and cards came from: we played Spades two nights ago in the basement. Ajax nipped and yiped at our heels while we dealt and doled through each trick.

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It's my last Friday at home and my parents' 23rd anniversary. To celebrate, we'll run into O-town for din-din and gaming at D&B's, bumping through the cobblestone Old Market on the way. It's the city of Brando and Fonda and the Union-Pacific's golden spike, a growing Heartland metro for concrete centers and ethanol factories and farmland tributes: not a perfect district for the streetwise artists, jazzy bumpkins and pock-cheeked retirees and farmers who somehow found themselves here, but the way they see it, "You've got to find yourself somewhere, sometime."