I watch my kiddo hunched over the iPad — legs tucked under them, chest pulling toward their knees — and I’m immediately reminded of myself at 8.
Transfixed. Unable to focus on anything else. My body telescoped into the ready position.
My kid is rebuilding the Death Star on Minecraft on our iPad.
I was playing Simon.
Do you remember Simon?
It looked like the early 1970s conception of what a space alien ship might look like: round, with a mounded top, glowing light. Imagine the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hovering above the earth, while those five notes had been repeating with no response, and then the ship rose and blared out the same five notes. Windows broke. People ran. We had made a connection with people from another planet. Jubilation.
Simon looked like that.
It’s hard to comprehend now — since everything moves so damned fast — but Simon kept me occupied for an hour at a time.
If you haven’t played Simon, here’s a small snippet of a woman showing you the first steps. If you concentrate hard, with no distractions, you can go higher and higher in replicating the pattern. Often, I would reach up to 100 sounds in a row or more.
Seriously, I would focus on this thing for hours. My hands never stopped moving.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Our Kind Kitchen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.