My 9YO daughter asked me a few days ago, “Have you ever played Monopoly?”
“Uh, yeah…of course I
have! Like, millions and millions of times.”
When I grew up we didn’t have the Internet. After the sun
went down my family only had a few options for entertainment: 7 channels of TV
with virtually nothing to watch (we didn’t have cable as that was for the “rich".) Read. Draw. Or played games
with the family such as cards, usually poker, Uno, Parcheesi, Life, Battleship,
and Monopoly.
Then I realized how crazy it was to be 9 and to have never
played Monopoly. What kind of parent am I? Teaching her how to #hashtag, code,
draw, tear apart and modify toys when every kid should have played Monopoly at
least once by now. It’s almost like growing up without candy, birthday parties,
or any (delicious) gluten. I immediately pulled out my iPhone and ordered it off
Amazon.
Amazon Prime is so awesome and dangerous. Every time I use
it I feel like that Coyote in those old Roadrunner cartoons ordering from ACME.
I really wish Amazon Prime would deliver in wood crates; that would be awesome…
When we got our package we began to play almost immediately.
Then my childhood memories came back to me in a quick flash. I realized that
Monopoly could be played 1 of 2 ways:
1. You let the kid win.
2. You play as you would any other human.
1. You let the kid win.
2. You play as you would any other human.
Nearly 2 hours into the game, I had hotels on Boardwalk and
Park Place, owned about half the board, and was trying to teach her how to
negotiate with me before her mother was going to go bankrupt with everything
she had earned in the last 2 hours. And just then, her big eyes welled up, she
got up and said softly, “you’re a bad daddy” and walked away.
After I collected the rent she owed me from her stack of
money, my wife nearly wrote out a divorce contract on a nearby used paper towel
(which happened to be mine as well…)
As I lay in bed that night, thinking, I realized that my
family ways might have been a bit too harsh. We had to play until the end no
matter how rough life (on the board) was or how many hours had gone by. You
couldn’t walk away. You weren’t allowed to give up. You played and learned how
to negotiate into eventually winning (and destroying the other players) and
when you finally won - it felt great - because you knew how long it took to get
there. It meant something real. My family doesn’t fight about politics or
religion; no, they fight over who won in the last game of Monopoly!
Game can’t all be like Candyland where the point is just to
make it to the end without crying. There
aren’t even dice in that game, only colored cards and the only conflict is
staying out of the molasses “Oh look, I got stuck in molasses swamp… I’ve
learned a valuable life lesson.” That doesn’t mean anything. Nobody learns
anything from that other than just stay away from something called molasses
that nobody ever uses anymore!
Now Monopoly on the other hand - Monopoly is life.
Word to your mother (and her paper towel.)
No comments:
Post a Comment