In between our summers, we would send each other postcards with notations for our latest moves in a series of simultaneous chess games.
Each August I would go to the post office to purchase a stack of pre-stamped, plain white postcards. I addressed each of them for the partners who I was playing long, remote games with: a boy in Pittsburgh who played the saxophone, a friend of his who was soon graduating from high school, who lived in a town as small as mine, but as far east of Pittsburgh and I was north. These were my summer friends. Except for two weeks in July, I never saw them. We connected with postcards, mailed once every week or so. On the back of each was chess notation that symbolized our moves like the notes on a score animates a violinist when playing a sonata.
