Daria
05-02-2007, 10:43 PM
The summer of 1988, I was 4 years old and my family owned an Atari. The system was old and well loved by that time. In fact, I never knew the console in it's hey day when it must have sat proudly beside our living room TV. Delighting my parents on christmas morning as my brother would have sat amongst the wreckage of discarded wrappings racing between traffic and hoping over lily pads. I don't even know if I ever knew the system before that year, I can't remember when my brother set it up on his bedroom tv. It was just as if it had always been there.
To my mind the only game that existed for the system was Smurfs, although I realize now that we must have owned more. I would sit on my mom's old black college trunk at the foot of my brother's bed. Incidently, that trunk always had a rich sweet but spicy sent. Like stale Big Red Chewing gum (My brother and I had a habit until the day my dad caught us attaching the sticky wads to the bathroom ceiling. After that the substance would be forever banned from our home.) And while I played my brother would coach me on jumping over a river, which for me proved an impossible task.
My brother was also very fickle about when he'd let me up in his room to play. Which now I realize how annoying I must have been to a twelve year boy. He was practically a brooding teenager, and I was relentless in my stalking. I had even mastered the art of creeping silently up the stairs and unlocking his door with a penny.
And so came that unforgettable summer day of '88. My brother was playing BattleTech with his friends on the congrete patio table under the shade my mom's ginormous schefflera tree. It was a good day because I was allowed to watch. When my dad suddenly thrust open the sliding glass door that led into my brother's second story bedroom. "GRAEME!" Like a crazed lunatic he started shouting at us: "Fiddle with MY things?! How about I fiddle with YOUR shit!" and with that my father tossed our family Atari into the air and swung my brothers aluminum baseball bat. It stuck hard and shattered on the concrete as we all watched, mouths dropped in bewildered shock. Then came the long shower of busted cartridges as my father, one by one, batted them off the balcony.
To my mind the only game that existed for the system was Smurfs, although I realize now that we must have owned more. I would sit on my mom's old black college trunk at the foot of my brother's bed. Incidently, that trunk always had a rich sweet but spicy sent. Like stale Big Red Chewing gum (My brother and I had a habit until the day my dad caught us attaching the sticky wads to the bathroom ceiling. After that the substance would be forever banned from our home.) And while I played my brother would coach me on jumping over a river, which for me proved an impossible task.
My brother was also very fickle about when he'd let me up in his room to play. Which now I realize how annoying I must have been to a twelve year boy. He was practically a brooding teenager, and I was relentless in my stalking. I had even mastered the art of creeping silently up the stairs and unlocking his door with a penny.
And so came that unforgettable summer day of '88. My brother was playing BattleTech with his friends on the congrete patio table under the shade my mom's ginormous schefflera tree. It was a good day because I was allowed to watch. When my dad suddenly thrust open the sliding glass door that led into my brother's second story bedroom. "GRAEME!" Like a crazed lunatic he started shouting at us: "Fiddle with MY things?! How about I fiddle with YOUR shit!" and with that my father tossed our family Atari into the air and swung my brothers aluminum baseball bat. It stuck hard and shattered on the concrete as we all watched, mouths dropped in bewildered shock. Then came the long shower of busted cartridges as my father, one by one, batted them off the balcony.