An epic run
When our daughter was born almost nine years ago, my husband and I made a decision to keep our children’s lives mostly low tech. And we’ve stuck to that policy with no tablets or phones and limited movies.
But, as a treat, we’ve occasionally integrated in some old school video games. My daughter got to play classic Mario with me for the first time the other night. She immediately took to the pixelated characters and unmistakable music — and I do mean immediately.
Because it was such a novel experience, she was hooked within 15 seconds, glued to the screen with a wide, glassy gaze. We played levels one through four over and over. (Well, if I’m being honest, it was mostly levels one and two while I recalled shortcuts and firepower locations while struggling just to stay alive.) I taught her how to crouch to go down the tunnels filled with extra coins — believe me, we were playing badly enough that we left no coin behind in a never ending quest for extra and much-needed lives. I remembered how to stomp on the turtles officially known as koopa troopas (I’m trying to give you a very technical recounting here) and send the remnant shell flying to take out an encroaching line of little goombas — those mushroom things with desperate eyes and a sideward, shuffling gait. We’d jump together and scream in horror anytime these deadly characters got too close, and our personal record — not one most people would actually be proud of — amounted to dying five times at the start of level 1-1, which is, like, the very, very beginning of the entire game.
But we had a blast.
Somehow, through the murky depths of many years, a memory surfaced in my mind of a one-up in a level I will not disclose lest I make would-be players’ lives too easy. It took a couple of runs to figure out how to bash a hole in the gray brick ceiling so we could capture the elusive yellow and green mushroom that ricocheted away the moment we released it. In case you’re wondering, one can only do the necessary bashing when Mario is tall, which seemed somewhat discriminatory to me and prompted an a cappella (and very well done, if I do say) rendition of Alan Jackson’s 1996 country hit “Little Bitty,” during which my daughter glared at me with the ire of someone who is not moved in the least by at-home performances, however professional-sounding. And I digress.
We took on the levels over and over from a nest of blankets and pillows we’d made on a bed with plans for one of the epic endurance runs that my husband and I made in our own childhoods. We remember getting together with friends or cousins for a darn-near all-night Mario or Bubble Bobble or Zelda session that would leave us seeing those black-outlined primary-colored scenes in our heads the next day and living with the strains of the familiar electronic music looping through our brains.
In this present-day session, I sometimes drove, and sometimes, I passed the controls to my daughter. A couple of hours in, I developed the ache in the upper portion of my neck that comes from straining to see the action on the screen from a reclining position, but I pressed on, not wanting to let her down because, as my husband and I both remember, we’d rather have propped our eyes open with toothpicks than be the first to give in to exhaustion.
And then, my daughter yawned, sighed and rolled over.
“I’m sleepy,” she said.
“What??” I replied, astonished. “But it’s only 11:47 p.m. This is a Mario marathon!”
I was met with a dismissive hand wave, and the first sighs of sleep weren’t far behind. And there I was on my own trying to chase down that oneup for the 21st time.
Kids these days are clearly more cognizant of their own needs than previous generations, and after a night of rest, my daughter was ready to get back in the game. And that was a good thing because by that point, I’d died 13 times in 4-1 trying to make it past that horrible cloud/ snowman thing (I was done hunting down proper terminology at that point) which continually and strategically rains down porcupine bombs, and I needed all the help I could get.