Start early, end late

Remember all that "Baby Mozart" craze where people would play classical music to their infants, and event to their pregnant bellies?

We did a version of that for Alan. This was the soundtrack to his time in utero:

When we first moved to Wisconsin, Mom was working long hours in Oshkosh. Dad and I spent a lot of time together at home. We would play the whole Super Mario Bros series, Dr Mario, and the TMNT games together. For years, Mom refused to play, thinking that all these games were silly or violent. But one day, when she was pregnant with Alan, this music lured her in. The intense competition with Dad to get the best score kept her there. And I was relegated to watching.

You could say that Alan had games in the blood. When he was in late middle school and  high school, his insomniac nights were filled with computer games. This seemed to mark a shift in him -- he was no longer the happy-go-lucky kid of his early childhood. He became sullen at times and struggled to get up each morning. He started to rewrite his life -- remembering the days of letting everything roll off his shoulders, making friends with everyone, as troubled times.

Later, when he had started college, sometimes the only thing I could do to interact with him at all was to sit behind him while he played computer games. We would talk about the games themselves. Usually, he would turn off the game music and listen to classical music, which made everything a bit more dramatic, especially Skyrim and the Fallout games.

Some of my last moments with him were playing MarioKart Wii, which I had taken to calling Mario Speedwagon. It was one of the few games where I could actually beat him. We stayed up late (for me, anyway) Thursday night playing before I called it quits and went to bed. I thought about the two of us maybe going as Wario and Waluigi for Halloween.

 I guess we didn't make it that far.