Chuck E. Cheese & The Meaning of Life
"What are you doing today?" my husband asks, as he sits next to me on our bed, already dressed in shirt and tie, to put on his shiny grown up lawyer shoes.
At 7:00 a.m., my feet have yet to touch the floor. Three days into a leave of absence from my own lawyer job, this question, directed toward me with a tinge of envy, is already part of our new morning routine.
"I'm taking a group of kids to Chuck E. Cheese," I respond groggily, awake enough to watch my husband flinch slightly and any trace of envy drain from his expression. His morning depositions followed by hours of conference calls with the West Coast are suddenly looking pretty good.
I know not a single parent who welcomes the opportunity to hang out at Chuck E. Cheese. It is loud, with bright lights, exploding colors, and fat-laden cheese-coated foodstuffs. There, all things plastic, artifically flavored, or capable of breaking during the ride home in the car can be found.
But my younger daughters still love it. And so every once in a while, when I am feeling particularly indulgent, I will take them and a couple of friends. Once there, I purchase way too many tokens for them to play the games, treat myself to a non-diet coke, crank Jimi Hendrix at full volume into my ears on my ipod, and pretend that I have taken some new hallucinative drug.
About five minutes into this routine, just as Hendrix was promising that there must be some way out of here. . . there's too much confusion, I can't get no relief, my youngest daughter pulled on my sleeve. She was in the middle of playing skee ball but had already grown tired of it. Rather than move onto another game she might enjoy more, she was determined to accumulate all the tickets she could in order to "win" one of the plastic toys that would break in the car on the way home.
Meanwhile, my middle daughter was laughing with her friend on the simulated roller coaster, totally unconcerned with tickets or toys, just soaking up the joy of the moment. I looked around the room and noticed that the kids broke down fairly evenly into the ones obsessed with accumulating tickets and those just wanting to shoot some hoops or play with the water guns.
Let us not talk falsely now, the hour's getting late, Hendrix wailed. And with that, I pulled the ipod from my ears and focused my full attention on skee ball.
At 7:00 a.m., my feet have yet to touch the floor. Three days into a leave of absence from my own lawyer job, this question, directed toward me with a tinge of envy, is already part of our new morning routine.
"I'm taking a group of kids to Chuck E. Cheese," I respond groggily, awake enough to watch my husband flinch slightly and any trace of envy drain from his expression. His morning depositions followed by hours of conference calls with the West Coast are suddenly looking pretty good.
I know not a single parent who welcomes the opportunity to hang out at Chuck E. Cheese. It is loud, with bright lights, exploding colors, and fat-laden cheese-coated foodstuffs. There, all things plastic, artifically flavored, or capable of breaking during the ride home in the car can be found.
But my younger daughters still love it. And so every once in a while, when I am feeling particularly indulgent, I will take them and a couple of friends. Once there, I purchase way too many tokens for them to play the games, treat myself to a non-diet coke, crank Jimi Hendrix at full volume into my ears on my ipod, and pretend that I have taken some new hallucinative drug.
About five minutes into this routine, just as Hendrix was promising that there must be some way out of here. . . there's too much confusion, I can't get no relief, my youngest daughter pulled on my sleeve. She was in the middle of playing skee ball but had already grown tired of it. Rather than move onto another game she might enjoy more, she was determined to accumulate all the tickets she could in order to "win" one of the plastic toys that would break in the car on the way home.
Meanwhile, my middle daughter was laughing with her friend on the simulated roller coaster, totally unconcerned with tickets or toys, just soaking up the joy of the moment. I looked around the room and noticed that the kids broke down fairly evenly into the ones obsessed with accumulating tickets and those just wanting to shoot some hoops or play with the water guns.
Let us not talk falsely now, the hour's getting late, Hendrix wailed. And with that, I pulled the ipod from my ears and focused my full attention on skee ball.
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