Checkers and Compliments

If I try really hard, I think I can come up with a total of about 11 compliments that I've received in my life. One of them had to do with checkers. Back in those days, so hard for even today's poor to comprehend, people did not buy things, except for basic necessities. My father decided we were old enough to learn the game of checkers, but we had neither checkers nor a checker board. I remember he took an old broom handle, marked it into 24 even sections, sawed them through, and painted half of them red, leaving the other 12 their natural color. He probably used cardboard or maybe a piece of plywood for the checkerboard; I can't say I remember. I do remember his sitting in his usual chair by the window, with the checker game laid out on the footstool in front of him, and me sitting on the floor learning to play, and then playing the game. It's odd I don't remember Joe or Dorothy playing; I'm sure they did. I only know I loved to play, and remember plotting advance strategies in my head, what man I would move if he made that move, and alternately what I would do if he moved there. My father played seriously, with deliberation, so I had plenty of time to plot out several different scenarios depending on where he made his move. I know it was before we had television so I was probably 9 or 10 years old at the most. I must have gotten pretty good at the game because one day my father paid me what I thought was the utmost compliment. He said I was as good as, no, even better than, some of the regulars who used to meet and play checkers at the railroad station. My father had evidently done that in his earlier days, possibly only 10 or 15 years previously, and while I would have realized that, and I did know where the train station was and knew that nothing much happened there anymore, I was still young enough to imagine myself walking into that train station and beating a path of victory through all those seasoned checker tournament contenders. All hail the child checker champion! Who said fame doesn't go to your head.