#87. Thrills and Spills (Friday, November 20, 1998)
What was your best day…of anticipating something while there was complete chaos going on around you?
Chaos. Guilt. And being an eight-year-old seeing your dad for the first time in two months. Sometimes that’s all a day needs to be memorable.
Back in September 1998, my father had moved temporarily to Indianapolis to take an IT/statistics job at Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. At the time, there was a strong intention for our family to all move to the U.S. within the year (as had been the case with many of my close friends).1
In any case, he was now coming home to visit for a week in November, flying in late Friday night. And I was really, really excited. Given my age, I had obviously been crying my eyes out the day he left, and was wishing he was around every single day he was gone.
The day before, my best friend Harry Liu (#100) had brought his baseball kit – i.e. a bat and a ball and (for some reason) a base – to school so we could play baseball. And at lunch recess, the two of us were playing, and then some third guy joined us. And inevitably, as the game went on, something took place that I thought was unfair, and I started building resentment to Harry, culminating in a play where I was running to home plate (i.e. the wall) and the third kid was chasing me with the ball in his hand, and Harry was cheering that third kid, and we kind of slid into the wall together – which obviously led to conflict of whether I was safe or out, which obviously led to me exploding in tears, which led to a “peer mediator” (one of the older kids monitoring the schoolyard) coming to deal with the issue. I was crying and blaming Harry, and they took my side. Note the sky outside was really dark and rainy.
Well, this clearly upset Harry, so he burst into his own even more dramatic crying and walked off. I caught up to him, and he explained to me how this hollow plastic ball that we had damaged and gotten mud all over from our antics, he had spent $10 on – all of his hard-earned allowance. At the moment, I just felt so, so bad for everything I had done, and wished I could take it all back.
This time we ended up making up, and it was very successful. The mood seemed to flip from horribly depressing to friendly bliss over the next hour; during which Harry and I, along with several other third-grade classmates, gathered around the class computer, wracking our brains and debating how we should solve these fiendishly hard puzzles on The Incredible Machine2. We were knee-deep into this when afternoon recess came, and Tony told us: “Let’s go. It’ll be even better outside.” And as we stepped outside, the dark sky seemed to dissolve into this clear mist as we joyously played four-person soccer goalie (as per usual practice).
The next day, on Friday, the big highlight was gym class. We almost always only had a half-gym (because another class was also there), but today we had the full gym. So our teacher organized this huge game of soccer-baseball. And it was wild, one of the wildest gym classes I ever had in school. We were smashing the ball around the giant gym walls, flinging the balls at each other (to get each other out), and cheering like maniacs. It got so crazy that the teacher shut the game down early and told us to go back to the classroom and put our heads on our desks.
For eight-year-old me, those two days were just a total blur. It felt as if the world around me was moving at twice the speed, and things that didn’t normally happen were happening left and right.
All that, under the tense anticipation that my dad was just hours away from coming home.
(NB: To cap it all off, my dad would bring home a PlayStation – my first video game console – and with it my first two video games ever: Bottom of the 9th ’99 (a baseball game) and NHL Powerplay ’96. So the next day was more or less a repeat of #103: the second time in a year.)
- But then, after seven months, he permanently came back. No real explanation was given: the consensus among my mom and grandparents was that he “just couldn’t make it in the private sector, especially in the U.S.” From the point-of-view of eight-year-old me, I was thrilled. My only real impression of the U.S. at the time, from what I saw on TV, was good baseball teams and lots of murders.
- This really well-designed (and amazingly educational) old-school game where for each of the 150 levels, you were given a bunch of components – e.g. a conveyer belt, a bowling ball, a candle, a flashlight, etc. – and told assemble some elaborate contraption to accomplish a simple task. The one we struggled with on that day, “Wheeeee…”, you needed to make the ball (which started off rolling down an incline into a bottomless pit) fall into a basket of metal pipes on the other side of the screen. We were given three trampolines and a see-saw; for half an hour, we kept trying to configure the trampolines to bounce the ball just enough; it was only weeks later that Paul thought to place the see-saw under the incline to give the ball some extra distance…