Back to Birch Lane Elementary School.

Back where this whole elementary school thing started. After fifth grade I switched out of the Spanish immersion program I had been in since kindergarten, which had interestingly enough started at Birch Lane, which I was now going back to for single lingual school.

Even though this is the 89-90 school year, my elementary life does kind of go out as we switch decades which is nice for orders sake. Sixth grade will being in the new decade, one which will seem by far the longest of my life and like the most filled with stuff. The 80s that I am about to look back on though is the single human view for me as the start of life. Nothing I can really remember happened in the 1970s. I was an unwilling participant at that time. But the 1980s I was active in.

                Those years would shape so much of the future that is coming, Star Wars, collecting, video games and technology. The groundwork was here. I have memories I have been working on sorting out from the 90s with Karl, where we started watching an anime called Ranma ½. Even though I know the family room didn’t exists in the L street house after the summer of 1991, because the anime is a “Cartoon” my brain has somehow put my memories of Karl and I watching one of the VHS tapes in that room, since the aesthetic in my mind should be that way for cartoons.

                This change is going to be a big deal, even though at the time it was just this cool thing of the change of a decade. Something which children my age had never been through yet. Queue up Fall of 1989.

After the school year I had in fifth grade it was decided at home to have one year of “normal” elementary school. Which meant transferring to my local elementary school instead of being in a unique class. It was actually a welcome break. For one I needed some non-Spanish in class time to catch up a bit, on the English front. Also, the immersion class kept the same group of kids together the whole time, and we hopped from school to school, so being able to make new friends was actually really helpful developmentally. Sadly, I knew that at the time even. The entire year was a breath of fresh air. Not all the kids at the new school were great, but the year itself reinforced the idea that school can be a place a kid wants to go, versus forced to go.

Also, these kids lived in the same part of town that I did, so they would be my peers going into Junior High School versus so many of the Spanish immersion kids which would be going to a different school after sixth grade. Also, the kids being on my side of town made it so my paper route income and access to NES games didn’t keep me on par but gave me something cool that some of the other kids didn’t maybe have. I wasn’t just trying to keep up all the time.

To boot, and this isn’t bragging, but a lot of the lessons, especially the math ones, I had done years prior so the stress level of learning and competing against the other students wasn’t there. This fact can be taken as a good or bad thing long term, but after the year I had prior, it felt pretty nice. Made the year seem pretty easy and well, remember that rebel that got in trouble for the first two years of intermediate school? He wasn’t there. Turns out my behavior was truly a reaction to the classroom I was in and sixth grade being a different tone the monster went dormant.

Where this could have been a jarring change socially, things were not so bad. Fate somehow intervened and there Karl, my lone compatriot from Sunday school was in the same class with me. And between him and other boys I knew through organized sports I never really felt like a new kid. I do remember though that the girls seemed a lot older than what I thought I was used too. But that wasn’t really the case, their was just a different social focus for some of them versus the sort of studios, and some anti-male sentiment I was used to in the Spanish immersion class.

In fifth grade, prior to everything hitting the fan, I had started doodling, sketching, whatever you want to call it in a notepad during class lecture time. Humphries the year before allowed it early on I think to hopefully keep me from bursting out with comments during that time. But my new teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, allowed me to continue to draw when it wasn’t work time. Sketching during lecture time, sometimes instead of note taking was now cemented as something I would do for the rest of my life in school.

I think then once again drawing became my easy stereotype for kids to wrap their heads around. I was the kid who drew all the pictures. Whether it was the wizard from Gauntlet, which makes sense for this year, of my snail baseball league and even Indy cars thanks to Dad’s love of the Indianapolis 500. Obviously, this notebook was spring of 1990 during the sixth grade by the way. April/May for the sporting events there and spring break this year and Gauntlet, but I am glad I have some of the notebooks from elementary school still around to scan.

My cartoons were always a big deal, in the Art section of the site I talk about a big deal in sixth grade where I took these cartoons and love of the NES, go together with Nate, and made an active Boxing comic for a while in class. I was always coming up with new comic stuff based on whatever I was into at the moment though.

Embarrassingly and insightfully though was the day I drew little circles with faces and colored them all in. you know the emoji face, the yellow happy face that has been around it seems to me since the dawn of time. I did him, and a red one, and a blue one and so on. Then gave them all names. I was explaining this to another student named Pat, who for this class had fancied himself to be the “funny” kids, although another student, interestingly short in stature like him, T.J. was also always in battle for that moniker in class. Anyway, that social power struggle aside I was going over the names of the different circle men. The black one I called Mr. Period, simply because he looked like a period at the end of a sentence.

Well Pat decided it was time to get some mockery in for his benefit and decided Mr. Period was the red one, and I was being a perv lord. As he yelled this out, I simply explained he had it wrong, and that’s when he got louder, and I realized he was making what he felt was an edgy joke at my expense and this wasn’t a misunderstanding. Disappointed, I never really trusted him again and after he ran off thinking he had pulled a good one on me I just explained it to the girl sitting next me, Allison I think her name was and the event was over.

Part of the sixth-grade curriculum is a week of what is called outdoor education. When I was that age that meant a week away from home with your class at Sly Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I know now a days there are a few outdoor education locations, but back then it was Sly Park.

The weirdest thing about memory is I remember going and being at Sly Park, but a lot of the details are hazy. It is an odd introduction though for 11- and 12-year-olds where I come from, that being Davis, to suddenly have a mess hall and dormitories. I also remember us having a counselor, who was a Davis High School Student, and as I recall was very meek. I remember them telling us how much extra work the counselors had to take on to have the job that week and it seemed like a lot to do just to be in charge of a room full of kids that weren’t listening.

The most memorable thing about the week there was that Dad drove up and visited. I don’t remember a lot of parents doing that, and I also had no clue he was going to. What added to the strangeness of the visit was that I spent most of the time sitting in a window talking to him as he stood outside talking to a kid in the other sixth grade class from Birch Lane, Jason T. Why? Well turns out Jason and his family were somehow distantly related to some side of my dad’s family, of which I wouldn’t even know where to look to figure that out now in the current day. At the time that day it was a revelation, since after all this was a new school and new classes with a lot of new kids I didn’t know. Now I had a cousin, sort of.

I also remember making a lot of lanyards while we were there, I think unlike scout camps and Camp Putah in Davis, there was a lot more instructional time and indoor time than I was used to at a camp. I don’t remember there being much in the way of water activities either, which is odd since most camping I did as a kid always heavily involved canoes.

It’s weird, this year was so nice some of it doesn’t resonate. Everything was so different to where I had been that my memories of it are just sort of a smooth background song in the history of my timeline. I remember having to do a big foreign country report, I paired up with another kid who wanted to do West Germany, and with my pictures from a couple summers prior we made quite the project.

Then later in the year, really in 1990, since this would now be in the spring, I was working on another group assignment that had a class presentation portion. We were set to go right before we got out for Spring break and then something happened.

We had plans to visit Reise in Hawaii that year during spring break. Which is something that would usually constitute a summer vacation. Instead, mid presentation in the sixth grade I got a call from the office that Mom and Dad were there to pick me up. I bailed on the project and was loaded up into the car with all our things and we drove to San Francisco to park the car at Bob and Julies house in the city and then have them get us to the plane.

This is when I am not exactly sure where along the drive to San Francisco Mom realized we forgot something major, like the plane tickets or some such nonsense, pretty sure it was the tickets. My child brain which is trying to retell me this story says she realized near Golden Gate Park in the San Francisco itself, and we had to double back to Davis to get the tickets and speed all the way to Bob and Julie’s to then eventually get our ride to the airport and get loaded up on the airplane in time. It might not have been that deep into the drive, but it was somewhere along there and there is a twelve-year-old trapped in time in my mind swearing it’s in the city.

Hawaii was a unique trip. How lucky was my brother to get interesting new places for his family to come visit him at. This like European cities and Arkansas before hand was a completely new visual to take in. I had been to the alps, so steep mountains were something I understood, steep tropical island mountains and the jungle around them, different than I had seen, different than portrayed on TV.

This was a big sightseeing trip again. One day while we were there we just took to driving around the entire coastline of the island, Oahu, which was the island we were at. We learned the state fish humuhumunukunukuapua'a, I got a tacky souvenir shirt, we did some beach combing, hiked up Diamond Dead crater, snorkeled, you know tourist stuff.

One of the days was dedicated to a shoreline hike on the northeastern end of the island. This was quite a walk from what I recall, but it resulted in the most interesting whale watching I’ve ever seen, and trust me Mom will try and see whales more than once in my life. When we got to the destination beach we were met with Humpback whales, maybe gray whales,  I don’t know for sure, they looked like Humphry. Anyway, we were met by them breaching. Just some giant sea mammals jumping around in the water. I would see water shows with dolphins in my life, nothing like seeing the whales just jump out of the water of the coast with no prompting though.

But as much as this was a new place, you can’t change the Reise in Reise, and Reise can always get Dad to agree to go to a flea market. In 1987 at some point baseball cards became the major hobby and in 1989 became where I spent my free dough. I’ll get to where that money is coming from soon. This is a big change from a couple years back in Germany where I had managed a weird German version of some of Garfield at Large and some plushies for pennies on the dollar due to my lack of German and small frame. Now I was a rich kid with a real hobby to search the vendors for.

Did I find a rare old baseball card on the cheap, nope I bought GI Joes. Sort of out of left field I found some booth selling a lot of newer (1987 vintage) Joes at what seemed a price I could justify. And so, I bought a large number of figures. Although starting to age out on the toy playing age, I still held a small torch for these things and, especially the Joe with the boxing mitts sparked something in me for a month or so there.

image  Me, Dad, Reise Jr, and Karen atop Diamon Head in Hawaii spring break 1990

Technically the Hawaii trip is the first trip for 1990. But it was during the sixth-grade school year so I’ve elbowed it in the 89-90 school year.

Another fun fact, since I did have my own bank roll for this trip I also bought something way stupider than G.I. Joes. The most touristy t-shirt imaginable:

There I am wearing the thing in all it’s “I just got back from Hawaii and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” glory. I thought it was awesome. Also, to note here, from around 5th grade to 8th grade I think, a red sox or cubs hat. Almost always on. I went through a couple of both, I think. I remember Mom and Dad always having a cow because they were twenty dollars every time I wore one out.

1989 through Fall 1991 the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Era.

image  The NES Action Set similar to the one I got in 1989, and Link raising the Handy Glove in the air, the bane of a bad save for me one day.

Okay here it is. The other major turning point from fifth grade Spanish immersion kid into finally understanding my potential. Not really, but I would turn 11 in February of 1989. I was in a mess of a school year, I need something to do with myself, so remembering a school trip to the local paper from days gone by I knew I was old enough to get a paper route.

It was an interesting idea. I don’t know the actual spark for it, whether it was dad’s pushing or if I was so desperate to have my own money that I tried to figure out some way to do it. I managed it and received route, well I don’t remember the number, I was just the route along J Street, not to far away from L street, through the Ivy Towne apartments and the duplexes across the street. Something silly like 101 papers to deliver five days a week in the afternoon and then on Sunday morning before church.

I quickly started killing it on my route. Then I started getting offered to emergency deliver routes for no show carriers. These were called “down” routes and paid a flat twenty dollars to do. Dad’s eyes sparked up when he found out about that, and would almost always offer to drive me out to do the routes when he got home. Luckily the routes wouldn’t get reported until the papers were late, which was in the evening so he was usually home in time.

Within no time I was swollen with money. My parents marched me down to the World Savings bank around the corner from the house were we had been going for, well my whole life, and made me open an account. Why I had to make a deal with them I don’t know, but the deal was, 50 percent went to the bank and the rest could be cash for my new life of luxury. So, I bought a Nintendo (NES). No point in building up tension when you see the header for this section. Mom couldn’t say no anymore because it wasn’t her decision, my unsaved fifty percent was mine, mine, mine to spend, spend, spend and I had been denied this game box for too long.

My purchase of the NES ends what I discussed prior, which was the “random 80s console” times. The T.I. 99 was the most memorable of Dad’s budget machines, but until I bought my NES, I had never felt like I had my own agency when it came to video games. Donkey Kong was fun, but a lot of the time it was played as a family, and a lot of our games were also education based. At school they gave us tidbits like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? But those were controlled by teachers. Now on the day I bought the NES I got to make the choices from here on out. This new time of agency was going to become the NES era!

One of the next major things I would have to get though was my own television. Having the console and sharing it on the only set in the house took my video game agency and threw it back into my mother’s domain. This would cause my early gaming in the NES era to be fraught with time limits and restrictions. An outcome most foul.

I have one major recollection though from this period of television sharing. It is also the time a game forced me to mature a bit. One of the first games I started playing frantically was the second Zelda game. Prior to the NES era I had watched my friend Jason play the original Zelda game some. That experience was enough to want both it and its recently released sequel once I had my own machine. Another friend of mine, Michael T. had been playing the second Zelda some before I bought my own copy.

Ridiculed in modern times for its switch to side scrolling, as eleven-year-olds we were fully down with the new sword moves and action, it was indeed amazing to us. Now, decades later this game is known for its silly difficulty in comparison to the other games in the Zelda line. As a little a guy I just thought it was an issue of me having to adjust to the new orientation of the game from the simpler looking top-down style of the original. So, as I made why way through the game and its limited lives before having to restart. I finally one afternoon made some headway and after attaining a much-needed progression item when I died, I went to save my progress to the game cartridge as was customary.

Now NES games are a little different than modern games and computer games. To have save files it required the cartridges to have their own batteries to keep the necessary parts active so the game could be able to back up your information. Because they needed more parts then on the game boards to accommodate this, not all games saved progression back then. As well, the ones that did like the Zelda games still required a whole to do when turning the game off. I have heard the reason why, I don’t recall all the details, but when you saved the game and powered down you also had to hold the reset button to make sure everything went as planned. I never had an issue with it as a kid though, that’s just the way it was and we had to do it every time, no problem. But as luck would have it the one time in a million time that the system ever betrayed me was that day. That day I had my biggest little kid freak out ever over the situation. First, I broke my controller in hand out of the swelling rage, which as I have become older found out a lot more people seem to do than I think is healthy for society to be okay with, and second, I then proceeded to karate kick out the back of several of the dining room chairs. I was pissed and need to break things.

Overcome with guilt once I came too, this would mark the first time in my life I remember being mature enough to realize I had done something inexcusably stupid, and I wrote up a long apology letter in which I offered up a contract for punishment to my mother for my heinous deeds. To my surprise when my mother got home, she was so moved by my understanding of what I had done wrong along with the contract that I was spared any other additional punishments and any sort of tongue lashing. Instead, both parents praised me for my maturity. That day video games taught me that quick acceptance and assessment of bad situations can diffuse the problem and stop it from causing further issues. Just accepting a bad thing and negotiation tends to lighten the load. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work within certain systems we as a society have setup, so while I adopted at an early age an acceptance and introspective way to deal with dilemmas, I sometimes lack the fight it takes to get what you want in a world that sometimes favors the dishonest and not taking responsibility. Who knew?

Near Christmas of 1989 I would get called up to work at the Boy Scout Christmas tree lot with my father. This was the first year I was old enough to work the tree lot. Of course, for those that don’t know the Boy Scout Christmas tree lot is a weird American institution where the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) order tons of Christmas trees, send them all over the country and then have the scouts peddle those trees to finance all sorts of BSA endeavors. The scout Christmas lot worked on a prideful volunteer basis, under the idea that they are building character and responsibly, and the organization gets free child labor.

Now in Davis in 1989 the boy scout Christmas lot was where the Border’s bookstore shopping center would later be built in the 90s. Then of course Border’s went belly up and now the old lot site is just a little shopping area in downtown. In 1989 it was empty dirt across the street from the Boy Scout cabin. So, on a cold December night Dad and I go to this dirt lot hustle to help make the BSA some of that sweet green.

I had two tasks at the lot that night, label the different kinds of trees with different colored ribbons. Different style trees commanded different prices. To me they all looked like drying out dead trees, after all my family always went out to a “cut your own tree” farm and had a relatively fresh tree through the holidays. A lot of these trees had been cut and shipped on trucks to us, thus had gone large swathes of time with no water, and so, dry. I didn’t get the real importance of the pricing for different species of dead pine. But some commanded a higher price than others and kids understand upselling. So, I labeled and told people which trees were which and upsold like a good boy scout.

My second task was to carry the trees to the customers cars for them. At age eleven I probably was about five feet tall and wait around 90 to 100 pounds, not small but not huge either, just an eleven-year-old. Some of these trees could be considered my peers then when it got to height and weight. The most annoying thing about hauling the trees when you are little though is the awkward shape of them. But I managed it and then helped put them in the trunks of cars or tie them to the roofs of others. Then something magical happened. I got a tip from someone. I don’t think it was more than a dollar, but it was cold hard cash.

Now I was motivated to be as helpful with the carrying out to the car process as possible because I have discovered the power of money for services rendered. I became the most helpful scout ever! And as the night grew on, I had amassed quite a little treasury in my pockets, including one Susan B. Anthony dollar, which I don’t think I ever spent and was probably lost when my parents moved out of the L street house (spoiler). Proud of myself I told my father what was happening. And he swelled up with pride that I was figuring out a way to make honest pay out of manual labor. However, his pride eventually was tempered that night when the representative on site for the BSA lot found out I had made upwards of fifty bucks in tips for carrying out trees and was told to stop accepting tips immediately. Like I said free child labor, strictly enforced.

The damage was done, for one I was never interested in working the tree lot again in my life and my dad thought the BSA reaction silly as well. It was honest money for honest work. He was proud and drove me to the Longs drug store so I could use my hard-earned money on whatever reward I chose. I bought myself a copy of Excitebike for the NES. It was a fun game, which we all played for years, but the memory of that game doesn’t lie as much within its gameplay but the way in which it came to be in my possession.

image 46 Excitebike and the Davis Boy Scout Cabin next to where the Christmas Tree lot once lived.

Tengen. I am in a pickle here. Excitebike was this memorable story of hustling a video game out of one of those boy scout events that I could mandatorily stuck in. Turning a negative into a positive, only to start a controversy.

A very auspicious start to Christmas of 1989. Now I have told people, probably said on here somewhere, and truly believed I don’t remember much or anything about this holiday. But organization brings to light that we lie to ourselves about how much we do remember. I think I might have some of this years Christmas down a little bit.

Mom had been on an athletic kick since I think 1988. Somewhere in this kick she ran the Bay to Breakers in San Fransico and competed in at least one of the local Triathlons. I know about the latter because for at least one of them she volunteered Dad and I to hand out water along one of the paths, interestingly up the street from the Putah Creek riparian reserve where Camp Putah was held every summer.

In the middle of all this training Dad figured it would be an amazing gift to give mom a new bike. The one she had at the time was older than I was to be honest, and had a little chair mounted on the back for little tike me to ride around on.

There I am standing next to it, maybe six or seven years prior and I am already probably too big for the seat. It wasn’t a bike Mom could use for a good triathlon time for sure. But Dad was Dad, and he wasn’t going to just give her a bike under the tree. This was meant to be a surprise. This adds to my speculation that Mom had been talking about doing these events but felt she couldn’t with her ratty old bike. So, Dad, being Dad as I said, hired a Santa Claud to deliver it Christmas Even night, either right before or after Christmas Eve dinner with Steve and his family. It looks like Bob and Julie might have been there too, I need to see who has the better pictures from the night.

This leads to that other thing. Tengen. The NES at this point even though new to me had been around for a while and this was fixing to be the first Christmas I would have with it. Now there was one gift that I know I got this year because of some weird tradition I had built up with Mom and Dad:

Starting in either 1989 or 1988 Mom and Dad always got me the factory sealed score baseball card set for the year. I don’t know why it was score. I also seem to have the bowman set for 1990, so I might have got two sets for Christmas in 89, but for certain I got that yellow box.

And that was where I thought that was. And back again to that word, Tengen.

Unliscenced NES games. At the time I didn’t understand what was up with these oddly shaped NES games. Eons later I found out it was a licensing protest, by Atari I believe. There was a whole to do about Nintendo and greed with it. What I think it’s relevance to our story is, is cheaper games. My parents weren’t big on buying me games at this point and I have a feeling these guys, RBI Baseball and Gauntlet were cheaper.

So considering the lineup of players in RBI Baseball, and the timing of my Gauntlet sketch in my notebook, These Tengen produced NES titles were also probably neatly wrapped under the Christmas Tree this year and may be, depending on something I don’t remember the first time I didn’t have to buy my own NES games.

And these weren’t just unlicensed throw away titles parents buy kids to save a buck. Which parents do, especially back then when this all seemed new. RBI Baseball got played a lot, and I will go on about that later. For now we focus on Gauntlet.

Gauntlet was an arcade title I was familiar with. If I recall the arcade version allowed up to 4 players, but the copy I had the NES only allowed two. But since it was an arcade game, its main core gameplay loop was to suck quarters out of the player. Therefore, the game featured a health system that ticked down constantly. Added to this was that the game featured something like 100 unique levels, all of which were mazes with puzzles and keys to find and get through. The game was fun, but it wasn’t well easy.

But I gave it it’s due and played it off and on. By now I had my other titles, Excitebike and so on. But during spring break of this school year I would sit down with Karl, and over three or four days we would go back and forth between each other’s houses in an attempt to beat the game.

This was a feat for two elementary school kids, not only did it have it quarter earning game design, the game required collecting codes to get into the last dungeons and to restart at certain points deeper into the game, since back then games featuring the ability to save your progress were very few.

Then as you move on through the game, the labyrinths start sporting walls that can’t be seen:

These took a while to figure out. I have found out too as an adult that there is some way in these levels to take the wrong exits in the mazes and just keep looping around the levels, all while your valuable health ticks away. But we did get through them. But then we hit a brick wall. With no internet to speak of in 1990, we got to the last couple of levels and found out the password we had been getting hints of we hadn’t completed and it would require going back through the whole game to find which one we were missing.

A sad end to an epic few days of NES gameplay, all through a game which Nintendo didn’t want us to have. Those few days of gaming stuck with me for years. To an extent it was odd back then to just consistently hang out with one friend like that. When younger, family might be over for days at a time, but a friend coming over during a holiday week had to be arranged, so it was also kind of my first window into what being an older kid was like I guess. Memorable.

 

Now the NES era is going to squirm into the 1990s. And now finally is when I make the call to get my own television. The past year or so I having to play in family room when I could, was going to be a thing of the past. I got a parent to drive me to the Woodland Mall (County Fair Mall) and I went to Target and bought one of the cheaper 13” televisions I could find. I believe it was a Panasonic, all black, which was cool. Before in the family room we had what was probably about a 15” television from I’m guessing 1969, it was off-white plastic shades and looked like it was thrown together by the design team for The Jetsons. Then in the not too distant past to my purchase Mom and Dad got a new television for the family room. While a 19 incher which seemed big back then, it still had the wood panel sides that were in style prior to the shift in electronics from trying to be pieces of furniture to their own thing.

This slick all black television just seemed so much cooler, and I could hookup my NES too it. Now Mom and Dad could watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy after dinner and I could game. Since I was still a paper carrier, I could afford new games too. I worked hard on catching my library up to kids that had had and NES since 86 or 85. But the game that caused me the most pain was Super Mario Brothers 3. Prior to seeing the game in stores, it was introduced to me and many other children in the United States via a movie called The Wizard. The Wizard is actually a decent film for being a movie that is essentially a 90-minute ad for Nintendo, no really this isn’t a nostalgia thing, they masked this 90 minute announcement of the big upcoming titles with a story about a mildly autistic child who runs away from home after his parents troubles become too much to bare. His parent’s troubles come from the loss of his twin sister, and we follow the story of one of his older brothers and a girl they met on the road as they try and get to California, which is what our “wizard” is preoccupied with. Along the way they find him to be a video game prodigy and that’s where they tie in all the merchandise, but it works surprisingly well compared to modern shameless advertising.

Anyway, thanks to that movie, we all wanted to play the new Super Mario, thanks in part to the movie showing off actual game play “secrets”. Of course, when I found it in stock at the local Long’s Drug store around the corner from the house, I got sticker shock. Most Nintendo games were around 49.99 (dollars) new and could get as low as 4.99 once they were old. I remember Super Mario Brothers 3 sitting there behind the counter with its tag of 79.99. Probably the only game in the collecting era of vintage Nintendo that was more at retail than it is as a collector’s item. 80 bucks was a shock, I had to run back home and get some extra loose change to make up for the tax. But I did get the game.

Was that money well spent? it worked out. The game of course had its peak as a new game, I bought it around springtime of 1990, which was the tail end of sixth grade. Sixth grade was a great school year but since I was doing a transition year from Spanish Immersion to regular school I didn’t have as many friends come over and play video games as one might think a twelve-year-old to have.

That changed though once I hit my stride in the seventh grade later that year and through the spring and summer of 1991, me, Chris H., Jared and sometimes Randy E. would sit in my room and play a lot of Super Mario Brothers 3. Chris H. really got into the different ways we could go through the game, and we all got hours of laughter of Randy’s unbridled anger at Mario when jumps and dodges didn’t go his way. That’s a barrage of new names. Knowing the name Chris though, just in general good to know entering this new decade.

By Summer of 1991 in the NES era, I and others had played a lot of fun games on the system that would help distort our brains as we grew into adults. The Mario games essentially came with the system, well barring the eighty dollars I spent on the third installment. Watching almost everyone to ever play Duck Hunt at our house by cheating and putting the light gun up against the television, was always good for a laugh. Building tracks in Excitebike just to watch the little biker run back to his crashed bike over and over again to try and complete the torturous tracks we built. Trying desperately with Karl during spring break to complete Gauntlet and its one hundred levels. Figuring out the finer points of The Guardian Legend and of course beating the Zelda games instead of beating things up because of the Zelda games.

Those couple years proved to me I was right to purchase the NES and by the end of this era during that summer (91) we were all having great fun with the little plumber that was Mario. He’d come a long way since running up the girders in Donkey Kong with my folks on the T.I. 99 to wearing a frog suit to power through swimming levels and dawning a turtle suit to toss hammers back at those evil koopas.  Early into eighth grade, in the fall of 1991, Keith started to tell us tales of a better-looking Mario who could fly with a cape. Keith had a friend, Ricky I believe it was, who was Japanese and had access to the new Super Famicon from Japan. This was the “new” NES system which had a new Mario game. This would also mark the reign of a console that really didn’t get long enough to be the main focus of someone’s slick bedroom TV.

Back to 1990, after spring break I think the school year just went in fast forward mode to junior high. Much the tale end of secondary school, the focus becomes on what is up for next year and all that setup and this sort of weird goodbye to elementary school.

I remember one field trip to Holmes, the junior high school we would all be going too, there was a little tour and then we watched the musical they were putting on at that time. I wouldn’t remember much of this if not for the fact that one of my mother’s students had been working on the voice part at the house for so long it was either interesting or weird to see her up on stage performing it for other people.

I also would been in my last year of little league, from the looks of the team picture, no one my team was even at Birch Lane that year, so I don’t think I even relate anything from that to this school year. To an extent as much as the transition seemed smooth, still other than Karl that I had known for years now, everyone was a new friend and that meant somehow not a close friend, this would make for a summer, when not at camp that would be a little lonely I guess.