There are times in your life where your parents are cool. And then there are times in your life when your mom or dad (or both at the same time) are so uncool you don't know how you could possibly have them for parents. But this post is all about the cool.
I went through the worshiping years where my mommy was the greatest person on the planet. She knew all the answers, was the smartest person I knew and she was also the prettiest. My dad was also a really cool dad, because he was a magician and it doesn't get cooler than that, and he was always working on something exciting in his basement that involved lots of parts.
Every now and then though, something would happen that was beyond cool. For example, I got the game Pong for Christmas one year. At the time I didn't realize how exciting this was, nor did I understand how impressive the technology of the day was to make this very early video game, but I was thrilled. We played and played and played pong out. Dad could beat us all as I recollect, and I could miss the ball more often than I could hit it. Good times.
The best though was the year I got my Star Wars watch. Star Wars had come out recently and I had seen it, it being my first PG movie ever, and we thought all things Star Wars were cool. As a family we had the soundtrack records. There was the main record with the big hits, the Cantina song being my favorite, and we also had the second album with the less-popular songs.
I had the R2D2 remote-controlled toy and probably a bunch of other great Star Wars things that have mentally been filed in the, "forgotten childhood" drawer. But the one thing I'll never forget is my Star Wars watch.
Dad outdid himself in coolness when he got me that watch. It wasn't like the watches of today with all the fancy things on it. It was black plastic and had a star wars figure on the face. Interestingly, I don't remember which figure. I think it was Darth Vader because his head is black and the watch was black. Strange that I remember where I was on the playground while I was checking the time one day and not what the watch looked like.
Moving along... it was a digital watch. I was one of the only kids with a digital watch. I was one of the few adults with a digital watch I'm pretty sure. And it was all mine. The watch did two amazing things. First, it told the time in very bright red LED segments. Not unlike the red alarm clock digits, only smaller. And second, it killed watch batteries.
The first time the battery died, which I think was about three days after I got the watch, we were perplexed. Maybe it was a bad battery. Second, not-inexpensive battery inserted and in less than a week, boom, Darth Vader had taken a second victim. It turned out that those bright red LEDs burning through batteries.
So, cool as it was, I had to lay the watch aside after a short while. That, or start a lemonade stand business to afford regular battery changes.
Years later when I was in sixth grade, the watch technology had advanced. Unlike my Star Wars watch which could only tell the time and show the seconds if you pressed a button, my Space Invaders watch had a video game on it.
It was a rudimentary game on a little LCD screen with two buttons. The invaders (or really one invader at a time) would move left and right and then drop down and you pressed the left button and the right button and tried to time your lefting and righting with the movement of the three pixels that was the invader so the autofire bullet would take him out.
That watch was fun on the bus. The best was watching someone hold my watch in their two hands and lean left and then lean right as the beat on the buttons trying to outflank the invader.
I had some cool watches as a kid. Thanks mom and dad.
The Big Boy Update: The snake in the box. There is a decorative leather box that sat in front of the fireplace for a long time. It got relocated to higher ground when my son got old enough to cause trouble with it. I decided to put it back down on the floor today and see if they noticed it. Pretty soon he'd come over and figured out how to unlatch it as well as unsnap the two leather straps. I didn't think much of it until later when I came back and discovered he'd re latched it. He put his stuffed snake in the box. He'd wound it all up and made it fit and then made sure it couldn't escape.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: "Has walked" versus "walking." There is a difference. When a child takes their first steps you can say that they, "have walked." That's an entirely different thing than a child who "is walking" regularly, to and fro, here and there, all day long. My daughter is in-between the two. She likes to walk, but she's not walking everywhere yet. She's not walking anywhere that's farther away than four or five steps. But she is walking more often and she seems more interested in walking to really go places as opposed to walking just to bridge a gap.
Fitness Update: 15 miles, longest run yet. Well, 15-ish. I was running two fitness apps and they were slightly off but impressively they were with .15 of a mile to each other after fifteen miles. Best half marathon time today too, beating my last run by six minutes. That's not bad considering I stopped to drink at three watering holes.
Someone Once Said: It is good to have an open mind, but not so empty that the wind blows through it.
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