Days Gone By

My childhood officially ended today.

I know, I'm 25 years old. I'm married, I can drink legally, I'm able to rent a car without paying extra insurance for heavens sake, but today, any scraps of childhood I had left, memories aside, are gone.

In the absence of employment, I'm doing something slightly more constructive than lying on the ground, face-down in my apartment, bored enough to count the carpet fibers. I'm cleaning out every inch of every box, drawer and shelf we have.

It started with a desire to make cards. I have oodles of craft supplies that have been sitting unceremoniously in two large cardboard boxes for the last year and a half. Upon moving to Sacramento, Bob shoved them in our hall closet, and there they've remained, untouched and collecting dust. I had him take them down on Friday, and I sorted through them looking for card-making supplies.

I didn't find the card-stuff right away, but I did find a whole bunch of other stuff - books, scraps I've been saving since college, inspirational quotes, my high school year book, etc. In a world-wind moment of inspiration, I dumped out both boxes and started to sort through everything, hoping to reorganize it in the box so I could access it easily in the future.

I ended up cleaning out two boxes and throwing away 90% of it. The remaining 10% was put in a new storage container and stored under my bed.

When you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk to go with it. And when you give me a chance to dump everything I own out on the floor to throw things out and reorganize, I'm going to want to keep doing it.

Since then I've tackled part of my desk, another box of unknown, long-lost items, my movies, my music, and my PC games, the latter of which brings me to this article and the end of my childhood.

For years, I have been carrying around with me PC games that are no longer functional on any modern computer, or at least barely so. I still have a stash of floppy disks with beloved games I would play for hours when I was in elementary school, games I grew up on. I have my first CD-ROM computer game, purchased in 1991 on a special trip with my dad and my brother to Best Buy after my dad purchased a new-fangled contraption to add to our computer tower called a CD-ROM drive. Some of these games still have to be prompted by DOS to work.

In High School, I would occasionally pull one out and try it out on my computer. Oh, those wonderful trips down memory lane. Warm fuzzies. The scent of summer would waft back to my senses, and I would be brought back to a simpler time, a time before algebra and physics, when summer meant hours of game play with popcorn and popsicles. A time when I could pop in that old floppy drive, hear the metal shield slide open and the game would start. All I had to worry about was getting Max through the school before midnight in Midnight Rescue, reading clues as he went, or getting him through the science factory.

Gizmo's and Gadgets was particularly sentimental. In order to work, it had to be prompted by DOS. I was in 2nd/3rd grade at the time, and my dad showed me how to get it up and running. I had to type in a series of commands to get it to work. I felt so cool, so...smart. Here I was, prompting commands, like a real computer whiz.

Of course, the floppy drives faded out as the CD-ROM gained popularity, and all my games were changed over to CD's. There was the first CD-ROM I ever had - 3D Dinosaurs and 3D Under the Sea Adventure. It was a two-pack. It came in a hexagon box. My dad showed Mark and I how to hold a disk so we wouldn't scratch it. We could see our faces in the pretty, silvery back of the disk. So cool.

My brother and I loved PC Games. We would spend hours on Carman Sandiego (the original game, see picture), or Commander Keene (ringing any bells?), sitting side by side or with friends, taking turns with more patience than when we shared Nintendo, and feeling a part of the 2D world in front of us.

It didn't stop as we got older, our gaming selections simply expanded. We moved from Math Blaster to Operation Neptune - better graphics, harder math. We sampled the exciting road races of Whiplash, and in the process we found our niches. Mark was able to take all of his self-taught physics and roller coaster designs to create coaster models in Roller Coaster Tycoon. I was immediately intrigued by the adventure and excitement of Pitfall, and fell in love with Sim Park. We would share Saturdays playing Titanic (yes, there's a rockin' PC game), and we peaked our gaming experience with  a little library-loaned beauty called Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time. It didn't get any better.

I've always cherished memory lane too much to toss away a chance to experience those summer days and Saturday evenings as a kid.

But today, after running through the list of PC games I own with Mark, I piled them up - over 30 games in all - and put them in the trash.

Why? Because it's time. I can't play most of them anymore anyway. I tried to install one recently, and it game me the nice little air message saying, "This framework is no longer supported by Mac". Meaning, "the rest of the world has moved on, it's time for you to as well." I have games that would run nicely on Windows 3.1. I don't have Windows 3.1, or 95, or even a way to get a floppy drive. The time and money it would take for that kind of operation is not worth a DOS game.

Besides, I'm really an adult now. It's not good for me to be playing LEGO, or American Girls Premiere or even Encarta Encyclopedia 98. A lot has happened since 1998. It's time for me to be a grown-up, put my childish ways behind me and explore new, exciting things.