Tim’s House

TIM SHAW is a very good friend of mine. A former NFL player, Tim was diagnosed with ALS a few years ago, and it has radically changed his life. This man who used to run around the football field now uses a wheelchair in public and has little use of his arms and legs. He used to chat up a storm and even do some freestyle rapping every now and again, but now he says only a few words and those are often slurred.

His main form of communication these days is an incredibly smart computer screen. He can look at the screen, and it will recognize where his eyes go on a visible keyboard and type out what Tim wants to say. He looks to the button that will make the computer speak, then whatever Tim’s mind thought and his eyes typed is read in a robotic voice to all of us in the room.

A few weeks ago, when Tim, our friend Melinda, and I were hanging out in Tim’s living room, we tried to come up with a name for his robot voice, but the system he uses comes with a few different voices and each is already connected to a name. Alfonzo, Karen, Thomas, etc. Tim has picked the most professional accent-neutral voice. His name is James, and he is definitely not the most entertaining of the options. It is significantly more hilarious when Tim uses Karen’s high-pitched female voice or Thomas’s very deep southern drawl. There are also other language options but the fear of changing it all to a language none of us knows and then not being able to change it back made the curiosity not worth it. But playing around with the different voices reading Tim’s thoughts had us all dying laughing.

Because of ALS, everything in my current friendship with Tim is a bit slower than the rest of my life. When I ask him a question, I then sit in the chair across from him and wait as he looks from letter to letter, typing words into a sentence that will, in a few seconds, be read to me, hopefully by Karen or Thomas but most likely by boring robot James.

Tim and I used to meet for coffee to hang out, but when it became more difficult for him to drive himself around town, I started going over to his house instead. I don’t remember how it started, but one day Tim decided that he would teach me how to play chess. It always felt like a game that was out of my reach mentally, but Tim promised he’d be able to teach me and that it would even be fun. It also gave us a thing, you know? A thing we did that was an easy connection point, something intentional that doesn’t revolve around eating or drinking or doing anything active.

Like many of us, I’m fairly proficient at checkers, but chess is a totally foreign game to me. There are so many different pieces that move in different ways—it’s confusing. But I really love the power and swag of the queen. There’s so much strategy and so much to memorize. Because Tim’s arms do not lift and his hands cannot grasp things anymore, it’s on me to listen closely to him and move his piece as he instructs, and then for me to respond with my move. It usually isn’t the computer telling me the moves to make for Tim; it’s Tim himself. In a quiet room with no ambient noise, if Tim has the energy, he can speak and be pretty easy to understand. So as we started playing, Tim would teach me and instruct me, still always managing to beat me. (He has never once, not one time, taken it easy on me.)

CHESS IS VERY HARD TO PLAY. That’s what I’d mostly like to say about that. Even in my smartest moments, I haven’t played enough to be good. It takes a lot of time and practice and lots of sitting down at the board to get very good. And Tim is very, very good. The problem for me, and I think this highlights a bigger problem in my life in general, is that I’m mostly concerned about the next move, the one right in front of me, not the one three plays from now. Tim says you always have to be thinking three moves ahead in order to win. Well, gracious, my brain can’t do that because I have to handle the one that is right in front of me first! I’m barely remembering which pieces go which way as it is—much less how to move those same pieces three moves from now.

But Tim always does. He always thinks that far ahead. And I can see it in his eyes as he looks down at the board for forty-five seconds, and I look at his face as his eyes get the tiniest little glimmer. One time in particular, after the glimmer showed up, he looked up at me and then started looking at his super smart computer screen. I figured he was typing a sentence to say to me. But suddenly, the speakers of the computer started playing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men and Tim began to laugh. And then he told me the move he wanted me to make for him—the move that would absolutely be checkmate—and I was done for. He is ruthless and easily humored by his own jokes.

It’s actually an excellent tool for teaching chess, to get to move the pieces for both sides of the game. For example, if Tim says “Rook to C4,” I look down and as I move that piece, I’ll say, “Wait, tell me why you’re doing that.” Sometimes he’ll teach me but other times he’ll just move his eyebrows up and down a few times and laugh. And then Boyz II Men gets cued up and I’m in big trouble.

LEARNING CHESS has been really good for me. Especially learning from Tim. I tend to run my life, and my fun, at an incredibly fast pace, which you may have guessed about me by now. Hurry to this, buzz through that, finish this thing so you can get to THAT. The slow pace of the game, the quiet of the room while one of us, or the other, thinks through the next move, has not only slowed me down but it has also slowly softened something in me. I come to rest while we play. I feel the muscles in my face and neck relax. I start to notice things around the room and outside I haven’t seen before. As I’m sitting and waiting for Tim’s move, studying the board, studying my friend, studying the breeze in the trees behind the pool, I’m learning to have fun slowly.

LAST CHRISTMAS we got my dad a really nice chess set. I don’t know how in my forty years on the planet I had never heard (or listened to) this fact about my dad—he really loves to play chess. It was a hobby of his as a child and teenager. He used to read books about chess and play it often, but he hasn’t made a habit of playing it in the last few decades of his life. (Probably because he was working full-time and had a wife and kids and, like many of us, gave up his childhood hobbies in exchange for an adult life.) So as I got into chess, and my mom reminded us that Dad really loves that game, all the kids in our family decided to get him a custom-made board and some nice weighted metal chess pieces. He was excited—we could tell as soon as he opened the gift—and it wasn’t long before the pieces were set up.

I immediately offered for us to jump into a game. I figured it would be fun to use the skills I had gained from getting clobbered by Tim to play with my dad. I was surprisingly nervous because it felt like meeting a side of him I didn’t already know.

Being a grown-up with parents can set up weird moments like this, where you realize for the first time that your parents, while raising you, were just normal adults (like you are now). I notice things about my life today and think back to when my parents were this age and I remember those years well. I just turned forty myself, and I clearly remember both my parents’ fortieth birthday parties. (Life is weird, man.) I try to look back on those stories through the lens of knowing what it feels like to be that age adult. It’s kind of trippy, honestly. And then moments like this chess game happen and not only do I feel like I have these glimpses of my dad as a fellow adult because I know some level of adulthood now but I also have moments where I feel like an adult seeing my dad as a child. Knowing what I know now, as an adult who relates to children, after learning about a part of my dad’s childhood life, gives me a new view of him.

So as we sat across the chessboard from one another, setting up our pieces, I pictured his innocent and kind little mind learning a game that came naturally to him and his logical self as a child, and now playing it again. He told me, offhandedly, that he used to read books and magazines about how to play chess. And I thought of the 1960s kid-version of my dad reading those books. And I wished I could have known him. I think I would have liked being his friend.

The game started off simple enough, and it was slow and quiet, just like with Tim. I was hopeful for that, more than I think I knew to express. I wanted this to be slow. To be savored. To carry some of the peace that I find across the board from Tim as well. It was different not to be moving both sides of play. It actually made me pay closer attention and watch every move. Dad made a few early suggestions, reminding me of who goes first and correcting me on my very first move. I told him I did not want to cheat, but he strongly suggested that I rethink that first move and then explained that if we went forward as we were, he would have me beat in three moves.

That felt embarrassing, so I decided to cheat rather than be embarrassed. ☺ I backed my guy up and made a different move. So instead of my dad beating me in three moves, he beat me in six.

I was stunned at his brilliance. I have always found my dad to be extra smart, but this was next level. He checked into something when he sat down at the board that I did not know lived in him. He was always kind, never incredibly competitive, and he always quietly played his next move. Then he’d sit back in his chair, rest his forearms on his thighs, interlock his fingers, rub his thumbs together, and wait on me to move right into whatever trap he had laid. I yelled to the rest of our family, “Wait, did y’all see that?!? Dad just destroyed me!” I’m sure my eyes were as big as saucers. He kindly smiled and asked if I wanted to set up the board and go again. And of course I did, mainly because I just wanted to watch him do that again. And I wasn’t done playing.

I knew the chances of ever beating him were slim, but I knew the chances of being with him were really high if I said yes again. And that’s what I love about playing chess with Tim too. It is fun and all, but it mainly makes space for connection and time. Fun often breeds that. There’s something specifically good and maybe holy about the slowness of this particular game and the way it stretches time.

Slow hobbies are good hobbies. In fact, the more I think, the more I cannot come up with a hobby that is rushed. Fishing is slow and requires patience until you get the fish on the hook. Crocheting a scarf cannot be rushed; it is done stitch by stitch. You cannot force a cake to be baked any quicker than the clock moves. Rock climbing requires slow and thoughtful decision making.

A theme I am feeling in my life, in my faith life, in my relationship life, and in my hobby life is that slow is better. Slow is good. For all the moments I want love at first sight, there is just something about the beauty of falling in love slowly and practicing hobbies slowly and living life slowly.

I’ve always found fun by going fast, but what if I’ve actually been missing the most fun because the rush mattered more to me? Tim is teaching me that in chess. But he’s also teaching me that in life.

ON THE SATURDAY morning of the Walk for Life in Nashville, the rain made it impossible to hold the event outside. So the hundreds of people in attendance were corralled into the university arena instead of out on the football field and track. A lot of teams were there supporting different friends and family members who are affected by ALS. After the awards ceremony happened and all the announcements were finished, the walk started. Since we were in a basketball arena, we just lapped the concourse, passing the concession stands and bathrooms over and over. Ashley, Chris, and I were walking together, toward the end of the pack, and as the concourse curved left around the corner of the basketball court, there was Tim’s wheelchair with his talking computer screen attached. But no Tim.

The pace slowed a bit as some sort of traffic jam was occurring. We all slowed to an almost stop. Through the crowd ahead, I could see Tim’s mom and dad walking with their arms around each other’s waists. And about four rows of people in front of them, I saw two of Tim’s brothers with Tim in the middle. Being held up by his armpits, one brother on each side, Tim was sliding one foot and then the other. It had been months since I’d seen Tim walk, and here we were, all following his lead, his pace, his walking. It felt a little like Tim had handed ALS a checkmate right then and there, reminding the disease that it doesn’t get to pick the pace or win every game.