Read Online Dreidels on the Brain by Joel ben Izzy - Free Book Online Page B

don’t need your help!” shouted my dad.
    I’ve seen variations of this same fight every night for years, and I hate it, even more than I hate the slurping. Once it starts, my mom can’t do anything to stop it. She just sitsthere trying to smile, looking more deflated by the second. So the next thing I know, I find myself saying something funny, telling a joke or a story.
    â€œHey!” I said. “Knock, knock!”
    They all stopped. So did the slurping.
    â€œWho’s there?” said Kenny.
    â€œDoris,” I said.
    â€œDoris who?” asked Kenny.
    â€œDor-is locked, that’s why I’m knocking!” It wasn’t a great joke, but they laughed. “Hey,” I said, “let’s light the candles! And after,” I added, turning to my dad, “how about playing One, Two—Bango?”
    This is a tradition for my dad and me. It started one day when I was eight years old and he told me to set up the card table because he had something special to show me. The table has a red vinyl top, wooden legs, and matching chairs, and was a wedding gift. Evidently that’s what everyone got as wedding gifts in the 1950s, along with waffle irons and toasters. My parents got a toaster too, but it’s broken, so about half the time it forgets to pop up. It’s really more of a toast incinerator. You have to stay there and watch it, because if you get distracted, ten minutes later you start smelling smoke, then run over and find that your toast is, well, toast.
    The card table is broken too, but we still use it. Oneleg doesn’t stay locked into place, so whoever is by that corner needs to make sure not to bump it, or the whole thing will fall over. I always sit there so my dad doesn’t kick it by mistake, when he swings his legs around to get up or sit down.
    After I set up the table that first time, my dad brought out one of those big, round empty cardboard ice cream containers you can get for free from Baskin-Robbins. Inside was a checkered plastic cloth with big black and white squares, and all these giant, hollow plastic black and white chess pieces. I had seen chess pieces before, but these were really neat, because the castles looked like real castles, and the knights like horses, and the bishops looked like the cantor and rabbi, with their pointy hats. There were pawns too, who looked like real soldiers, afraid of being captured.
    My dad showed me how each piece moves.
    â€œAlways keep an eye out for the knight,” he said. “It’s the most interesting piece, because if you’re not paying attention, it sneaks up on you. Watch this!” He moved a knight two steps forward and one to the right, saying, “One, two—bango!” Hence our nickname for the game. Then he showed me something he learned to do when he was young called “the knight’s tour,” where the knight moves sixty-four times around the board, landing on everysingle square exactly once. I could see why my dad liked the knight.
    I had played checkers before, which was okay, but chess was something else entirely. Every chance we got, I would spread out the plastic and set up the pieces. At the start of each game, my dad grabbed one black and one white pawn, hid them behind his back, and said, “Right or left?” I would choose one and that would be my color.
    When you play chess, there are a bazillion possible moves, and every one you make leads to even more possibilities. Even the biggest computer can’t think of all of them. They actually tried it with this giant computer, and smoke started coming out of it, like our toaster.
    My dad is good. That’s because he sees things other people miss. While I’m trying to think through all the possibilities for this, that, and the other, he’ll just kind of squint and tilt his head, then make a back-and-forth sound through his teeth, not quite whistling, just pondering. Then he comes up with some