High Score, Dad!

I was playing the rom from my old Tetris DX game for Gameboy. Don't ask, I had a disk packed with copies of games I've bought in the event (as like now) that I can't find the real cartridge.

When I loaded it up it had only one choice, "Entry". Entry is where you type in your player names into one or all of three slots.

On the cartridge I have two slots taken by names. One saying BRENT and the other saying DAD. I was reminded of him, even when this rom was clean. No high scores, no save files and no DAD, but Tetris was his game and it became mine as I got better at it. Eventually he had no high scores on the cartridge, because I had beaten them all in Marathon and 40 Lines after he'd died.

I've always been very quick to adapt and I don't often miss people. It is something I atone to me being a water sign and I am quick proud of.

Sometimes, however, like these times, I do miss people and then it passes.

Here was this game that had always had somewhat of a melancholy theme and it lacked the BRENT and DAD I had never put the effort in to change.

It's weird the things you remember about people though or the things that remind us of them, too.

When it comes to, say, one of the girls I particularly cared for then it's how it feels to have put my arms around their waste when standing behind them, or the first time I kissed Emma in particular, or this one memory of sitting across ways on a small staircase while my first girlfriend leaned back against my middle section. That memory in particular was during a rough time for me and I remember just how calming and centering it was for me in that moment.

Or perhaps the smell of beer. As many times since that I've drank, the smell of domestic beer always takes me back to sitting on the front porch of my Aunt Cyndi's summer home at Lake Gaston. It was vacation spot and generally at one person or another always one on hand.

The smell of nail polish reminds of my Mother's old nail specialist back in Suffolk, Virginia. No surprise.

My dad.... Well, the most vivid memory I have is how ruff the stubble on his face was against my hand or my cheek. I didn't care back then, but it's something of a precious memory now.

As many times as I've smoked and the fact that I generally hang out with smokers, you'd think this thought would have perished. the smell of good cigarettes still takes me back to sitting on the front stoop in Chesapeake where my dad was sitting in a chair watching the lightning shatter the sky. In fact, I've always loved the smell. It's like going home for the first time in years.

Cigars on the other hand, which I prefer for myself on rare occasion, by the way, remind me in scent of Rusty. He smokes cigars and I remember a rather ridiculous action he did through blowing smoke out his mouth, sniffing once then acknowledging it with a "hm."