Tonight's events...

5:19p: I arrive home from work : a Fed Ex sticker is on my door. It says the nice people next door signed for it.

5:25p: I go next door and knock, only to find an empty apartment.

6:01p: After a light dinner, I try again. Do these people work or something?!?! Nice people, my ass.

6:30p: As I leave for the gym, I give it the ol' college dropout try. Bitches still ain't home. I'll show them when I'm all pumped and Test-oste-roni tonight...

9:04p: I arrive home to find that my truly nice roommate has managed to wrestle my package from our supposedly nice but actually greedy neighbors. I tear open the packaging to find my childhood in a shiny box. A console recreating the old Atari system, complete with 40 games installed.

When I was 5 or 6, my parents bought me an Atari console and a buttload of games, my favorite the lot being Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man & Pitfall. In the pre-Nintendo world, this made me the coolest kid on the block. The other kids in my nieghborhood would bring over soda and food just to be allowed to play Pong or watch what happened when you did nothing with Pitfall while the guy was still swinging over the alligator. (For those of you who are wondering: the screen would change colors and the game would freeze. It was like a screensaver before there was such a thing.)

In a cruel twist of fate, my parent's convinced me some years later that I was too much of a "big boy" for a lot of my toys. This included the He-Man toys which could have financed my early retirement and, yes, the Atari system, as well. In truth, I hadn't played with it in years. But after the money I made off of that garage sale (and to an 11 year old, it was a lot of money) was gone, I regretted not having those things. In the years that have passed, I've regretted it even more. Not just because I could have made even more money, but because they were a piece of my childhood. That shiny box brought a me a small piece. I will probably stay up late playing with it just to see what I remember. Mr. & Ms. Pac-Man are absent, but Pitfall isn't I wonder if the screensaver effect still works...

-J.

This post was sponsored by the Save Your Childs Toys, Dammmit! Committee