Victory

Don't know what they call it these days but back in my time, they were called amusement parks. These are the places in shopping malls then, dark and smoky, with all the arcade game machines. School kids wearing uniforms were not allowed in, a futile effort to prevent truancy during school hours. Well, we kids (then) would just bring a tee shirt along to school. Scary people hung out there, to me at least; the boys were bigger, and a stare would easily lead to a fight. On the one hand, you had to concentrate on your arcade game, on the other, you had to always be looking down (to avoid being accused of staring at some idiot, and the popular games always had a queue. My parents never gave me money to visit the amusement park and what little left of my allowance was spent there. Needless to say, I was not there often and that was one bit of my childhood that was different from everyone's else.

I'm much bigger now, and older too. Kids whom I do not know at all call me "uncle". Some where along the way, the amusement park got another name. This one is called "timezone".

Father and son walked into one today, at Jamie's insistence. Nisa wanted to do her hair and Jamie spied an amusement park in the shopping mall. Jamie and I walked in, I surveyed what was around. The same tough guys were there but it was no longer smoky or dark. There are more kids around now and smoking is no longer considered "in". There was no need for me to fish out coins now because everything is now operated via a stored value card.

We walked around to see what were the games. When we left after some 30mins later, we had played quite a few shooting games. Not cheap too but it was worth every penny and memory. Jamie played the shooting game with me helping him hold the gun; but he did the aiming and firing. He shot down many bad guys in the game and my boy just blasted away. It was worth every penny and memory because he raised one arm in victory after the game; the other arm only stayed down because it was holding the gun. I could see he was signalling victory to the bad guys on the game screen and was obviously very satisfied.

Jamie and I lived our childhoods today.