I got a text from my mother this afternoon that I feel compelled to share given the prompt about technology today. She sent me the following picture and accompanied it by saying “Look what I found! And it still works!”
Let me tell ya’ about this little device. First, for context, it is a handheld electronic Yahtzee game. My mom and I loved playing Yahtzee when I was a kid. The actual Yahtzee. With real dice and actual score cards that you filled in with a pencil and then had to tally up to see who won at the end. When I was in high school, my mom bought this electronic version at Kmart. Can’t call it a digital version because it was very much just a simple electronic game with a double A battery in the back and super high-pitched beeping when you “rolled” the dice and pushed the buttons. If I remember correctly, it even kind of vibrated at certain points. Maybe if you got a Yahtzee? Which, if you’ve never played, means you had five dice that ended up on the same number. You had three rolls (I think) to try and get one.
That’s the game. There are far fancier digital handheld games now. In fact, I don’t even think handheld games are still a thing. Do we all just play games on our phones? I know Nintendo Switches are popular. I had the original Gameboy by the way. Just sayin’. But given the fact that my mom and I loved the “analog” version of Yahtzee with the actual dice and scorecards, we were over the moon with this little handheld phenomenon.
However, it was a solitaire game and you only had your own high score to beat. Or your mother’s actually. When she would finish playing and then hand it over to you with a smug look on her face as if to say, “Beat that score!” Come to think of it, her face didn’t just say that. I’m pretty sure she really did say it. There was smugness, there was pride, there was “friendly” competition that got increasingly more intense as this game was passed between us. I distinctly remember that it nearly came to blows (not really) the time she handed it over to me with a score that was her personal best and I countered by taking the battery out of the back, thus deleting her high score and giving me a fresh start. It’s possible that it was then that my dad took the game away from us? Or maybe she got so mad she hid it for a while?
I say all of this with a little smile on my face because as much as I have looked back on my life when I was in high school and cringe at the teen angst, and feel the anxiety as I reflect on the trauma my dad caused, there were still moments like this. When there was a period of time when my mom and I had fun. There was levity and laughter over this little game. It makes me want to see if I can find one of my own on EBay or something. That way I can send her a picture of my high score and proudly exclaim “Beat that!”
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