Buys

In December of 1993, my father made the surprise move of buying me a Nintendo video game system at K-Mart. This happened after five years or so of on-and-off pestering on my part. I remember that day well. He and I were shopping for yard-work stuff in K-Mart's lawn and garden section. I made a detour into the electronics department and looked at the shelf of Nintendo and Sega games. By now, the Super Nintendo had been released, relegating the somewhat archaic 8-bit Nintendo to a side shelf. It was discounted.

I returned to my dad, who was looking at hoses, and briefly outlined why a Nintendo would be a smart purchase. He considered it for a second and said "okay." I took him back to the Nintendo shelf and pointed it out, and I also asked "Can I get this game Metroid too? The Nintendo only comes with one game itself, so I need another one to play." Again, he consented.

My dad was not given to liberal spending, especially on frivolities like video games, but this day is important because I recognized something about him: my dad has never been that good with children. He's a nice enough guy, but his character is such that he treated my sister and me like adults since we were very little. The incongruity of trying to reason with children (and conversely for my sister and me: the incongruity of us trying to reason with him) never really reached a cognitive awareness with the three of us. We would try to supplicate him with emotion, while he would try to counterbalance that with logic.

Nintendo Day was one of the first times that I realized the power of making a compelling argument to my father. That's not to say that he started buying me stuff left and right; and in fact, I remember that he held this purchase over me for several years. But this day was a point in which our relationship became a little more mature. It was one of those ways in which we got closer to each other without actually talking about anything.