What would you do with two black queens?

Today I headed out to Costco to do a bit a shopping. You know, get kitty litter for the next ten years, pick up enough granola and shredded wheat to feed a small army (which we happen to have, by the way), toothbrushes for 10, and enough sudafed to dry up the Colorado River for a month. Just regular stuff.

But, you should know, that I can never stick to the list. I did very well today. And of the 34 items that made it into my basket (besides the children who were in and out so much it was hard to tell them from the groceries), only ONE item (okay, actually 4...if you count the 3 pairs of pajamas that weren't on the list but were on sale/clearance and were available in the next size up...) wasn't on my list. A chess set.

Yep, in amongst the toilet tablets with bleach, soft scrub with bleach, Kleenex, 12 rolls of paper towels, 5 pounds of shredded cheese, bohemian package of string cheese, 4 gallons of milk, five 40 pound buckets of kitty litter and industrial size jug of Robitussin, was a lonely chess set. It says "PLAY TO WIN: CHESS" in bold letters across the front. There's a lovely chess board, an instruction book and a fairly indestructible looking set of chess pieces.

After we came home from shopping, I busied myself with putting away the perishables, and then focused on cleaning out the hall closet (and let me just say that I made some rather startling discoveries there...man, the things that you find in those hall closets with their inevitable 4th dimensions). Meanwhile, our bookworm set out to learn all she could about the game of chess. With the help of her curious brothers, she poured through the book and then went about setting up for a game. And that's when we discovered we had issues.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all about tolerance. And equality and all the rest. But don't you think that changing the pieces in a chess set, and probably the rules, too, for that matter, is going a bit far? 8 black pawns? Check. 8 white pawns? Check. Rooks, knights, castles? Check, check, check. Kings? Queens? Um, well...

"Mommy, I think there is a problem here." Yes, I'd say that's a problem. You see, we had a white king, and a white queen. But then, all we had was two black queens. So here's my theory...black couldn't lose, right? Because it's all about the king. With no king on the board, it logically follows that your king can't be captured, and therefore you can't lose. But with two queens...man! Can you imagine all the havoc you could wreak?

So we went back to Costco this evening to return our defectively politically (in)correct chess set. As I tucked in my daughter tonight, her final words to me were, "Good night mommy, I love you. And when you teach me to play chess, can I always be white?"

"Because white always goes first?"

"Yep."

"Mmm hmm. We'll see."