On Carnival Wins, the Ephemeral Nature of Childhood Toys, and Short-Term Goals: It ain't pretty!

Who can relate? I can!

I sometimes wish I could pull a tape of tickets out of a machine and win. Win big. Don't you? It's an analogy. The analogy is something like this. Just like playing games at the arcade hall will garner you tickets (that win big!), once you go home you put the toy away; you forget about it. How many carnival game toys have you won and treasured? None. But I bet when you won that damn thing you were as hot as dry ice. You were stone cold happy. Winning a stuffed bear at the shoot out booth or scoring some plastic dinosaur from the crane game made you goofy happy. And you loved it. Sure. I remember going to the parish fair (we call state counties parishes in Louisiana) and feeling like I had won it all when my dad gave me a crisp twenty dollar bill and instructed me to play some games. I won a bouncy ball and a stuffed lizard. It was euphoric. I was so mad crazy over winning games I remember once my aunt took me to the arcade with my brother and we spent way too much money playing Smash TV. Quarters into tokens. Tokens add up. So do quarters. I took a recent troupe of students (I am a teacher) on an end-of-the-year trip to Dave & Busters. Those kids were as happy as the proverbial pigs in slop with their hard-earned won trophies. Plastic guns; plasticine bears; laughy taffy; yo-yos and other knick-knacks and treasuries that sure did seem like treasuries to them. I was just happy that they were serving lunch for the adults too; we got to eat crap-food on a Tuesday. Priceless.

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