Positional Play
“Cup o’ tea?” a man said with an Irish lilt in his voice as he headed for the counter where—three incarnations ago, when the shop was a coffee bar—he used to get his local dose of caffeine.
“Has it been that long?” he asked, and after we directed him to a bubble tea store down the street, I said to Josh, “Well, how about it? Could we offer tea? Coffee might get too complicated, but a nice cup of tea for those who don’t drink wine…?”
At the time, I was drinking chai with ingredients I’d brought from home, and it seemed like a smart move—if this was the 10th person who’d come in here this month looking for a coffee shop, perhaps that’s what the neighborhood wanted. Taking in the sight of me lapping up my chai like a cat from one of his shallow olive bowls, Josh sighed and said, “But then we’d need mugs that will take up space, and milk that will expire, and paper cups to go, and liability insurance for hot liquids, and a dozen other things.”
It’s true that I hadn’t thought it out. We had an electric kettle and plenty of spoons and I was dreaming like a child playing store of all the other things we could serve. With a jar of honey and a carton of milk, I thought we’d be set, but every move in business seems to require a license and a plan, so I moved on. To cheesecake that could be offered with red wine, and would require only the forks and plates that we already had, and then to the games we were playing in between customers at our daughter’s request, because sometimes a grownup’s world is boring—and children are right to believe not only that games are more fun, but that playing them can turn their parents into children again.
In Connect Four, as with Tic Tac Toe, you employ a strategy of blocking your opponent while also maximizing your line; whereas in Exploding Kittens, you need only the luck of holding onto your Defuse card in the event you draw a picture of a cat holding a bomb. We’d lost the printed rules for UNO and were playing it on our nephew’s instructions until a fight broke out over different interpretations of the “reverse” card, and we finally agreed to play chess, a game my daughter’s school began to teach her in second grade. At the tender age of seven, she was ripe to absorb the rules. After all, her life was governed by them —rules for home and school and play. But she was also really good at looking ahead, at following the diagonal lines to map out where her enemies might come from, or how she might get to them first.
In came several regulars to buy their Sunday beer. Six cans off a towering stack of Torch and Crown’s “Almost Famous” IPA, four off a stack of KCBC’s barrel-aged “Beast Slayer” and I saw Josh register the spaces where they used to be and mentally fill out an order form. It’s the job of every salesperson to project magical ease, the game to make this environment seem like a place where the rules of real life don’t apply. The machinations behind divining what people want and making it all happen—those are supposed to take place behind the scenes, in the corners of the mind where the next moves are planned out to the smallest detail. We had done this before signing the lease (How close is the nearest wine store? What is the average family budget—and will people be willing to spend their disposable income on alcohol?), but I’m learning it’s something you need to keep asking every time you make a move.
A bishop can move in any unobstructed direction diagonally. A knight moves in an L. A couple wove uncertainly through the tables, searching for a bottle of Italian wine until we told them that all of ours must legally be made in New York State. Recalculating, they asked for a Long Island red and gestured to the corner where the games are piled up waiting for players. “Could we play Monopoly?” Josh brought them two glasses of his Merlot blend while I continued to play his side and was defeated by my daughter in a single move I failed to predict.
Covid and a bad economy having upended the rules, Carpe Vino’s new strategy has played out in a number of successful musical performances over the past month. As for me? I plan to buy a book on what chess players call “positional play” so next time my nine-year-old doesn’t beat my pants off!
