| | A dragon lives forever,
But not so little boys.
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
-From Puff the Magic Dragon
Childhood. It was without a doubt the most memorable time in my life. A time of innocence. A time when every day was carefree because there was no responsibility, no bills to pay, no job to go to. I remember one of my favorite places to visit as a child was Chuck E Cheese. As a toddler I loved nothing more than jumping into the big pit full of plastic squishy balls, and riding all the rides: the helicopter that went up and came back down, the race car that took your picture while you were riding. Then the teen years came. And Chuck E Cheese was still my favorite place to hang, only now I played the "big kid" games: ski-ball, pop-a-shot basketball, and video arcades. From the day I was tall enough to reach the joystick and hit the buttons I was obsessed with video arcades! Pac Man, Asteroids, Galaga, Centipede...I loved all the classics! Then I really got into the action/fighting games: Street Fighter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rolling Thunder. When they opened a arcade at the local mall I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Every day after school I'd pray my mother was going out shopping somewhere, even if only grocery shopping, so that I could beg her to drop me off at the arcade and pick me up after her shopping trip. I spent many days in that mall arcade pumping quarters into arcade games until my pockets were empty. Hell, I probaly spent enough quarters in that joint to buy one of those arcades. These are memories that were all but forgotten to me...until just a few days ago when I learned that Kim's 6 year old niece was going to be spending the weekend with us. We pondered over what we could do with her, how we would keep her occupied. Hmm...what did I like to do at that age I thought? Then I remembered: Chuck E Cheese! Yes she would love that...what kid wouldn't? From this ephiphany I began to reminisce about my time spent there as a child. About all those wonderful birthday parties with the guy in the big mouse costume, all the pizza you could eat, and soda you could drink. I remember my mother buying 100 tokens for game play, then dividing them up equally among all of us kids and each of us went our seperate ways to play our favorite games! And I remember going from game to game and hitting the coin return buttom after I had spent all my tokens, just praying that somewhere in all those games, one of them was jammed with a bunch of coins that were stuck in the change slot and they would all come flowing out into my hands.
Anyway, this walk down memory lane led to me looking on ebay to see if I could perhaps purchase a piece of my long-gone youth, when lo and behold, there it was. An original 1986 Atari Rolling Thunder video arcade! It had been one of my childhood favorites! I spent many a day in Chuck E Cheese absorbed in that game, to the point that I was almost unaware of what was going on around me. I was so focused on beating the bad guys and making every precious token last as long as I could, that I think I literally entered into that world, kinda like in the movie Tron. As I looked at the pictures of that old Atari video arcade on ebay I began to think to myself, wouldn't that be cool if I could put that arcade in my basement and own a little piece of my childhood? Granted it might not seem as magical to me today as it did back then...hell, I'm not even sure if I would enjoy playing it anymore. Still, I just couldn't resist the urge to recapture what was at one time, an object that brought me more joy than anything else in the world. So to make a long story short, I placed a bid...and won!
Now you can probably imagine what my fiance said when I informed her that I had purchased a video arcade to put in our basement, despite the fact that we are supposed to be saving every cent for our wedding next May. But once I explained to her that it was about reclaiming a piece of my childhood, she was very understanding. Childhood's time is Adam and Eve's time before the fall when they left the garden and knew that they could never go back to the way things were.
Though nothing can bring back that moment of splendour in the grass..., I will grieve not, but rather, find strength in what lies behind.
-From Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworh |
