Last week, my daughter and I had to quickly run to the grocery store to get some food for the house.  We ran in, bought the dinner items we needed, and then exited the store with provisions in hand.  As we made our way down the sidewalk towards my car, we came across a man trying to use a water vending machine to fill the large water bottles he had with him.  He was clearly having trouble getting the machine to accept the handful of change he had brought, and he looked a bit exasperated.  As we approached, he stopped us to ask for a favor.  “Sorry to bother you, but do you have any singles?”, he asked.  “This thing won’t take my quarters for some reason”.  I quickly pulled out my wallet, found two singles there, and handed him what I had in exchange for his rejected quarters.  He thanked us, and we continued on to the car.

Later, as we got home and began to unload our supplies, I went to fish my keys out of my pocket to put them away, and my hand felt the pile of quarters I had got in change from the ‘water guy’.  At that moment it struck me;  it had been quite a long time since I had loose change in my pocket, let alone a stack of quarters.  I began to think about those quarters in my pocket, and what that used to represent to me when I was a kid….

I was in my early teens when the 80’s decade began.  I was a shy, awkward, super-skinny kid that didn’t have a large circle of friends to hang out with at that time of my life.  While sports were the activities most kids my age participated in, I was so skinny and un-athletic that I never had much confidence playing against other kids.  I tried soccer for awhile;  it was a non-contact sport that didn’t terrify me.  Even there, I was too timid around the ball to be of much use to my team, and I’m sure if my foot had really made hard contact with the ball my spindly leg would have shattered into little pieces. I was not what you would call a force of nature on the soccer pitch.  Instead of sports, I spent a lot of my time reading books at the library,  took piano lessons, and I even played Dungeons and Dragons with my friend Joe whenever I could get a ride out to his house.  In short, I was a nerd by every measurable standard (although if you were to have called me that back then, I would have fought back to deny that title:  “Nerd?  NERD?!?  No way!  I’m no nerd!  I’m a man!  I shaved my face…last month!  I even have a girlfriend…well, she doesn’t live here, she lives in Canada, but still…I AM NOT A NERD!”).  It’s possible that I might have been the ‘proto-nerd’, the standard by which all subsequent nerds were measured against:  “Let’s see;  pale, pimply skin from lack of outdoor exposure, check.  Bowl haircut, cut to match the Tupperware bowl your mother used to keep it even, check.  Under-developed calf muscles, cloaked in tube socks that go up past your knee, check.  Loves books and piano music, as opposed to football and learning to shred on electric guitar, check.  Well, it looks like your son scored an 8 out of 10 on the ‘MikeNerd’ scale, Mr and Mrs. Smith.  Perhaps he could become a botanist when he gets older, provided he can make it through high school without receiving an ‘atomic wedgie’ and dying from the subsequent embarrassment”.

Around that same time, the popularity of video game arcades began to spread throughout American suburbia, and even my little town had one open up shop (technically, our bowling center had games as well, but the arcade had less secondhand smoke and less ‘career drinkers’ hanging around).  When I took my first trip there, I was hooked immediately.  It was a large, dark room filled with game cabinets, and there were kids there…but no one paid attention to the people coming in.  Everyone was concentrating on the games.  For me, it was paradise:  an oasis where I could stop worrying about being bullied or made fun of and just have fun pumping quarters into the games and forgetting about the outside world for awhile.  When the quarters ran out and I had to go back to reality, I began to find ways to earn money to get back there as soon as possible.  When I did manage to scrape together some money through chores, the feeling of riding my bike to the arcade with a pocket full of quarters was like nothing else.  It was liberating and exciting to go into town on my own, and the hour I spent burning through my quarter supply was the most peaceful hour I would spend all day, despite the deafening noise level of the arcade.

Thinking about it now, I remember feeling a bit ashamed of playing those games.  I felt like if I were to be ‘found out’ playing these games by other kids in my school, I would have just cemented my uncool ‘nerd’ status.  But last week, when I touched those quarters in my pocket, it wasn’t shame I felt;  it was happy memories of a teenage boy finding refuge in those games that gave me peace of mind in a difficult time.  The arcade is long gone, but a part of it stays with me today.  Once a gamer, always a gamer.