By Kim J. Harmon

 

I was in the store the other day and came across a rack of the hand-held electronic football games that had been so popular when I was a kid. For one brief instant I was 10 years old and I almost – almost – looked over my shoulder to ask my mother if I could get it.

She wasn’t there, of course; her memory and the memory of some of those great Christmas presents I received as a kid are all I have left.

The electronic football was one of the best … even as unbelievably moronic as it was (and still is, I guess). How I could have been so captivated by moving a small red blip across a tiny LCD screen I’ll never really understand, but my brother and I both had one and we wore out a carton of batteries and mashed the buttons into oblivion before finally getting tired of the games. My brother actually tired of the game after he memorized the pattern and was able to play – and win – the game with his eyes closed.

There were other great sports games we got for Christmas – like that electric football game where you line up your little players on the field and then turn on the juice so that the field vibrates and your players spin around and wander off in random directions.

The best of them all, though, was Skittle Bowl. I suppose you’d have to be at least 30 and probably several years older to remember the real Skittle Bowl, but it was this game where you set up small wooden bowling pins on a plastic rack and then swing a hard wooden ball around on a tether to see if you could knock all the pins down. We played that game nonstop for weeks … to the point of driving our father to the brink of insanity (when the wooden pins tumbled off the rack, they made quite a bit of noise). I bowled some pretty good games, but never had a perfect game – that is, until we decided to line the pins up really close together so all we had to do was nick the head pin and all would tumble down.

But that was cheating.

From time to time I have searched for a Skittle Bowl but never found one (I probably would have been disappointed if I had; when I saw what had been done to the G.I. Joe dolls since the days when I was a kid I was really disappointed). Just this week, though, I discovered an authentic (or so the ad says) Skittle Bowl game selling on eBay for $10 and I briefly thought about bidding on it.

But I’m 42 and I get sad enough when periodic fits of nostalgia hit me; you can’t go home again – you really can’t.

I think about the electronic football games and Skittle Bowl and all of the things I used to get for Christmas and I realize what a timeless quality a lot of those toys had. Sure, we grew tired of them or eventually wore them out and got rid of them, but we still remember them. When my kids are in their 40s, will they remember some toy they got when they were 10?

I think not.

And that’s kind of sad, too.

Anyway, it’s Christmas and it’s winter so – naturally – I have some humbug gripes about this wonderful time of year …

 

eIt started snowing around 9 pm on Sunday night and didn’t stop until 6 am the following morning and when I went out to shovel there was no evidence – none – that a snowplow had made an appearance on my street. The snow was deeper in the road than it was in my driveway. I pay my taxes; how can this be?

eIt is not so fine a line between driving cautiously and driving like a frightened ninny. If you persist in driving less than five miles an hour while riding your brakes, then why not just stay in bed with a cup of hot cocoa and a book? Why get in the way of people who actually have to be somewhere?

eListen, thoughtful people (unlike my neighbors down the street) DO NOT shovel their snow into the road.

eMy wife was bummed when she realized that the snow – because of some higher temperatures and potential rain – might not last until Christmas Eve but I replied that snow stopped being fun and cheery when it became a nuisance (canceling school or games or causing traffic tie-ups) and became a chore (shoveling … shoveling … shoveling). Call me Mr. Grinch.

eIn a parking lot just jammed with cars, wouldn’t it seem rather inconsiderate to stop your gigantic Ford Expedition in the middle of a row and chat for several minutes with a friend who just happened to be passing by? The driver of the Expedition didn’t seem to think so, despite the SIX vehicles that had to wait for her to move. The only solace for us – the inconvenienced ones – was that the Expedition probably used two gallons of gas just idling there.