But our Princess is in another castle!

My theme lately has been the future. Pondering it. Planning for it. Filling my brain with anxiety about it. But in late hours of Easter Sunday, a few of my friends and I reverted back to ten-year-olds when John, who must have been slightly bored by the topic du jour, opened a cabinet in the family room and discovered my old NES gaming system. The original Nintendo. Stacked away with lots of my old games, a few controllers, and a lot of wires, it was suddenly the new topic of conversation and it wasn't long after that John and I decided to blow the dust out of the cartridges and see if the ol' NES had any juice left in her.

At first there there was just jumbled images and jumpy sound. Then it was the "pink screen of death" that was the true nemesis of many an 8-bit gamer. So we tried again, pulling the gray plastic cartridge out, blowing fiercely upon its "teeth" to remove the dust particles (and once into the NES itself for good measure). Ah, tech support at its best. Problem reading the disk? Just blow on it. As we all have magic breath or something.

But you know what? It works.

One more push of the power button --- and then there it was. Scrolling onto the screen like an old friend back from a languorous journey. A classic choice that I had made thousands of times as a kid. Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt. Rarely did I choose to hunt animated fowl back then (though I must interject myself to say that Erik is frightenly good at taking out virtual clay pidgeons -- and he looks so serious when he does it too, like he's really hunting or something), so, as per usual, I opted for another adventure with those famous plumbing siblings and soon a nostalgic sight filled my television screen:



The sheer simplicity of it is breathtaking, isn't it?

Now, when I was a kid -- don't all the best stories start with that intro? -- when I was a kid, I was a machine when it came to this game. I knew where every hidden treasure was, where all the warps were and pretty much how to get through the entire game in about ten minutes -- and I didn't rely on Nintendo Power for hints (and for those out there too young to remember, we didn't have the internet then to help us out either). No, I was a gaming god.

So you'll appreciate it when I tell you that Sunday night was --- I'll say it...humbling. We can call it that, though really I just lacked all ability to, well, I hadn't used that controller since the first Bush was in the White House and the game, it was tougher than it --- okay, fine. I blew. There. I can't even pretend otherwise. Over a decade and a half later and my glory as an NES gamer is all but forgotten. A Goomba. One of those little traitorous mushroom freaks - that FIRST guy you meet in the game. The first bad guy, who met his end a thousand times over at the unrelenting mercy of my tiny Mario feet, thwarted me to much embarassment and ridicule in the opening seconds of the game. My ten year old inner child was cringing with humiliation as my inept grown-up fingers took Mario from one death trap to another in a span of minutes.

Truly, the entire sequence was horrific.

And yet I don't care. It was fun. John and I sat there, oblivious to Michael and Megan (sorry, guys, we're rubbish as hosts when handed our childhoods as the alternative), and quickly popped in game after game, taking in screen shot after screen shot with the giddy intensity of ten-year-olds hopped on Pixie-Stix in a free arcade. Mario Bros. Super Contra. Off-Road. RAMPAGE! Mega-Man. Little Nemo. Zelda (the golden one). They were all there -- each one a time capsule of our youth.

I forsee many an hour being wasted in the coming months as we shun our XBOX and GameCube for the simple nostalgia offered by the little gray box called NES, with its five button controllers and two-dimensional, linear scrolling graphics. John promises to bring home some 8-bit games from GameStop (he's jonesin' for some 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles').

It's funny how something so simple and almost forgotten can make you, just for a second, forget about all the things that we grown-ups deal with. To live again as a ten-year-old, where your biggest worries were long-division, maybe some book reports, and whether or not you were going to beat Koopa or Gannon that day...it's never so good as when it's gone, is it?