When you exchange forty postcards with a man over two years, you learn a good deal about him. You learn when his daughter marries, when his roof leaks, when his team loses the cup final. You learn that he is ill when his cards come slowly, and that he is better when they come with long notes again. Some of my opponents I have never thought of as anything but a name and an address. Many more became friends. A few of them:

Herr J. Schindler, Kassel, West Germany. My opponent in the 1958 game on the games page. My parents spoke German at home, and after our first game I began writing my notes to him in German, badly, and he answered in English, carefully, and we each corrected the other. In 1985 my wife Rosella and I flew to Germany and had dinner with him and his wife in Kassel. He had kept every one of my cards in a cigar box. We exchanged Christmas cards until he died in 1993. His son still sends one every December, and I still send one back.

Mr. G. Litchford, Leeds, England. My opponent in the 1976 game. A schoolmaster, now retired, who writes with a fountain pen. He sends me cricket scores, which I do not understand, and I send him the Brewers' box scores, which he says he does not understand either. We are on our twelfth game.

Mr. W. Hettinger, Basel, Switzerland. A watchmaker. We have played since 1971, and our cards are half chess and half shop talk, since his trade and mine are close cousins: tolerances, gauges, good steel, and the way young men today are not taught to file by hand. He once mailed me a small screwdriver he had made, in a padded envelope, and I have used it for twenty years.

Mr. L. Osterman, Gothenburg, Sweden. We played six games in the 1960s. He sent Rosella a recipe for pickled herring written out in English on the back of a move card. She made it every Christmas Eve after that. I cannot say the children loved it.

Mr. B. Arciniega, Rosario, Argentina. The six-year game, which I mentioned on the first page. When it finally ended in a draw in 1983, he wrote that he felt he had lost a member of the family. So did I.

Madame M. Viens, Trois-Rivières, Quebec. My opponent in the 1999 game. A retired music teacher who draws a small chess piece in the corner of every card, a different one each time, depending on her mood. When she draws a knight, I have learned to worry.

Rosella died three years ago this November. A great many of the people on this page sent cards. Some of them I had never met and never will. I have every one of those cards, and they are not in the shoe boxes. They are in the desk drawer, where I can reach them.

Outside the United States, I have played opponents in these countries, listed by the order in which I first played someone from each:

I count England and Scotland separately, as the chess federations do. Some of those names are not what they were. West Germany is Germany now, and my old opponent in Zagreb, who used to write to me from Yugoslavia, has lived in Croatia since 1991 without ever moving house.

Every card that comes from abroad carries a stamp, and I have soaked off and kept every one. There are eleven albums now, one shelf's worth, arranged by country and then by year. Most are not worth anything to a collector, since postcards are franked with the ordinary stamps of the day, but they are worth a great deal to me. I can open the Swiss album and turn the pages and see thirty years of Mr. Hettinger's cards go by. The Japanese stamps are the most beautiful. The Swedish ones are the smallest. The English ones have carried the Queen's head since 1953, and in all that time she has hardly aged a day, which I find unfair.

There is one thing that worries me about the new arrangement, which I will come to now.

Joel set up the computer at Christmas, and in February, after I had learned to turn it on and off without telephoning him, he found me an opponent for a game by electronic mail: Mr. Horace Brown, of Adelaide, Australia, a retired railway man who has played by post for nearly as long as I have and was also trying the new way for the first time. We agreed to play by the same rules as a postal game, thirty days for every ten moves, and to write our moves in the numeric notation, out of habit and good sense.

Here is what I have learned so far.

It is very fast. A card to Australia takes nearly two weeks. An e-mail takes, as near as I can tell, no time at all. When I send my move after breakfast it is late evening in Adelaide, and Mr. Brown's reply is often waiting when I come back from the grocery. We are on move twenty-four already, which by post would have taken us more than two years. I am a pawn to the good, though I do not say that loudly.

There is no postmark. The computer puts the date and the time on every message, to the minute, which is more exact than any post office. Still, I found I missed the postmark. I print every message and keep it with the game record, and I still write each move on a card for my own files. Joel thinks this is very funny. Joel is seventeen.

There is no stamp. This is the worry I mentioned. If all my games go this way, the albums will stop. Mr. Brown, who understands, mailed me an ordinary letter in April with nothing in it but a note and a very handsome Australian stamp on the envelope. I will keep my postcard games going as long as there are opponents who want them, and as long as my hands can hold a pen.

The keyboard is less forgiving than a pen. In March I typed 6254 when I meant 5254 in a note about another game, and Mr. Brown, being a gentleman, wrote back to ask which I had meant before he went on. On a card I would have seen it. On the screen, my eyes slide right over it. I now read every message aloud before I press the button that sends it.

Would I recommend it? For a man who has twelve games going and is eighty-six, I would. The games go faster, and I may get to finish more of them. But I would not give up the sound of the mailman on the porch for anything.