He loved beef tongue, which I hated to see in the refrigerator, and he always wore a hat (many men did at the time). He once saw Houdini (I think he told you about that), loved crossword puzzles, and aspired to play chess after the ’72 Olympics. He liked that there was a sport where you remained seated and more or less solitary, and he admired the way that each move reduced all the chances up ahead; he made little notations when he looked at the games in the newspaper, and I still have some of those notes that he kept squirreled away in a book called “How to Play Chess in Ten Easy Lessons.” He had written “impossible” under the title with a big exclamation mark, but still he made his notes, and they are there in the book, just as he left them, things that make no sense to me: Nc3 f5 e4 fxe4 Nxe4 Nf6 Nxf6+ gxf6 Qh5#.

He once said he was sure he could be a better player if such concentration didn’t make him want to drink and smoke so much. You wouldn’t know all of that by those later years, the way he sat in his chair with so little to say, focused on whatever was on the television, a lot of silly shows like “The Gong Show,” which he would never have watched back when he was teaching himself to play chess, and he certainly wouldn’t have laughed. And yet there he was, laughing along with whatever silly thing Chuck Barris did. I checked on him daily for a long stretch of time (the rest of his life, I should say), the distance between us seeming longer and longer with each passing day, and especially in the winter. A broken hip that winter took him to the hospital and was the beginning of the end.

I never learned how to play chess, maybe because I associated it with those years right after my mother died, when it seemed that my father was looking for ways to fill his time, neighbors and friends at work encouraging him to have an interest or a hobby. Perhaps I also don’t have the brain for it! I wasn’t very good at bridge either. I was in a club briefly, but it became obvious that no one liked being paired with me; there was one woman, Naomi Brennan, who remembered every card thrown and talked the entire time, a Benson & Hedges cigarette always pinched there between her coral lips.