In another lifetime, I used to be a whole lot different than I am now.
I think it is called getting older, and more stable, and all of that. Some 30 years ago, I worked some pretty crummy jobs. Like three of them at a time… to make ends meet.
I bought my first house on Samuel Street in Dayton. It was a pretty shabby set of digs. Oddly enough, my Dad was born on Samuel Street… some 60 plus years before I bought that thing. How’s that for coming around full circle. Well.. maybe just 180º.
Anyway. Three jobs. I worked, ate, drank, and slept. Basically. One of those jobs was bartending. In downtown Dayton, at a place called The City Club. And then later, The City Cafe. It was mostly lawyers, and doctors, and such. What’ll you have buddy?
Yep.
I’d get home pretty late. And to wind it all down… I loved to play video games. Thirty years ago, things were getting completely awesome. We had taken a step past Pong. Honest to goodness. Nintendo came out with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was an 8-bit video console. It hit the U.S. in 1985. I bought one immediately. Tip money. Ends were meeting. I didn’t spend anything anywhere else. Just work, food, drink, and games.
The first game I fell in love with… completely… was The Legend of Zelda. It was very 2-dimensional. But amazing in every way. You had to smarten yourself up to get past this game. It was unlike any other before it. And in my opinion, any since.
Ten years later, we started having grandkids. Of course, when the first one was born, I gave her a little Nintendo shaped rattle. She held it religiously until she was three. At that point, I swapped it out with the actual controller for the game.
Haylee and I would play for hours on end… huddled in front of a little white Sony TV in the corner of any room we could find. To this day, I am a die hard Zelda fan. So is she.
So much in fact, I went on eBay a couple of weeks ago, and found an original “working” NES system, and an original copy of The Legend of Zelda. I snagged that auction right up. Tip money. Ends are meeting these days. Still.
Tonight, I went through the process of setting up the system. And moments ago, I played my first game of Zelda… the REAL Zelda. It’s been about 15 years since the last time. The first thing I did was pull out my phone, and send a picture on Snapchat to Haylee. And then I played. The bouncing spiders were the first enemy to zap all three of my hearts. Dag nab it.
Despite the spider-inflicted-death…. I was jubilant. Seriously.
You know how when you return to someplace from your childhood and it is WAY different than how you remembered as a kid? Like an old childhood home, or playground, or amusement park? It is smaller, or less significant?
Well. This wasn’t the case for me. This, was larger than life. It was rocking-horse-gone-wild-fun.
Life is funny that way. As I reflect on all of this, I am reminded that technology was rocketed through the roof. The games and their graphics have gone to an entirely different dimension. AND. Who would have thought that when Haylee was 3-years-old, that I would be Snapchatting on a cellular phone with her … about the very game we were playing.
It is like a convoluted occurrence of time travel or something.
And here we all are. In a space and time where so much, is SO very different. The world has changed and we have changed with it. Yet.
Yet.
Everyone once in a while, we are reminded that even though we have changed, in some ways, we have stayed very much the same. We have that innermost. That space in us where happy, and sad, and fun, and fear are found. And deeper than that is our consciousness, our awareness.
Things move us… as being funny, or sad, or good, or scary. Because those emotions are so deeply seated… knitted tightly around our core of our spirit, our soul… the part of us that goes on past this human condition.
But here we are. Doing what we do, to make our human lives good. Working to, and for, the good. We are living as we do, as the times change. We save our tip money. We make ends meet. We find our joys. And our sorrows. And if we are lucky enough, we have someone to share this human journey with. Because we are.