To Basement Games Like Air Hockey and Foosball and Train Sets

The McGills had this garage with a pinball machine and trains set up. The pinball machine was the kind you might see at a pizza place in the 1970’s, so solid you could knock it with your hip to position the ball. And the train set was elaborate with little houses and trees, rivers painted around tiny mountains.

Superbowl parties were the best because I didn’t like football and they had toys. Toys we could all play with so while the adults watched the game and ate their dips and argued about players and local politics, we’d hang out in the garage, playing and drinking Cokes and thinking that, even for a moment, we owned something.

In our basement now, we have air hockey and it rarely gets played, but when we need it, it’s there. We have friends over for dinner and they have two girls and a boy. They’re old enough to know that somehow they are all supposed to play together, that the adults want to hang out and the kids need to do the same, meeting only occasionally in the kitchen looking for more salsa. They will all go to the basement, even the 6 year old, and they bring their music and turn on the table. If they find nothing to talk about, they just play; they make up new rules or make a new challenge (if you score three in a row you get a bonus point) or they make teams or play with 2 pucks simultaneously. They send the 6 year old up for more Cokes and he goes because they are talking to him.

They come up from the basement a little sweaty, a little tired. They ask when’s dinner and what’s for dinner and what’s for dessert. When we say 20 more minutes, they head back down, grabbing a bag of whatever off the counter.

If you ask them later, you’ll realize they never asked each other their names. They know nothing that we would want to know: their age, what they do for fun.

But they know each other in a way that can only happen when you play a game where nothing is at stake. When you play far away from the voices of your parents. When you have been tossed together, told to have fun. When you get to make the rules and supervise yourselves. The little train chugs around the fantasy village. You pretend you are not pretending.