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| My ten-year-old life summed up in one picture. Oh, nostalgia! Image credit: Pure Nintendo |
I never stopped liking Pokémon. But as the list of monsters grew more long and complicated, life got complicated, too. Like many of the interests of my childhood, I had to put Pokémon away for a while--but I always hoped to pull it out again.
One of the fun parts of having kids now is that I feel like I get another childhood. My toddler is as obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine as I was at his age, and I love watching it with him. He also begs to play with Lego almost on a daily basis, and it's hard not to join him (as if I ever needed an excuse to play with Lego). Eventually, I will introduce him to Goosebumps, Animorphs, and Harry Potter. It's been great getting to enjoy the things I loved as a kid without attracting the judgy glares of other grownups. And I'm discovering new things, too, that I would have liked if they had been around when I was little; why, just last week, I was flipping channels on the TV at the gym and almost stayed on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.
So naturally, I'm thrilled that everyone's been talking about Pokémon these past few days. If you live under a Geodude and have no idea what's been going on, a new game just came out--Pokémon Go--that lets people find and catch Pokémon "in real life." Which everyone has wanted pretty much from the beginning.
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| I can finally catch a Growlithe on my morning walk! Image credit: The Verge |
The game is pretty brilliant. People are getting up and walking--voluntarily--and discovering some cool and crazy things all around their neighborhoods. I've seen a bunch of Facebook events set up already for players to meet each other and search for Pokémon together. Perhaps best of all, hilarious social media posts keep on coming. I think I love Pokémon Go.
But I won't be playing it anytime soon.
I could say something lame (and true) like my phone has no memory, or I'm too busy, or I don't want to turn my phone's GPS on and have people tracking me.
But the real reason I'm not playing Pokémon Go is far more dark and lies buried in my childhood.
It was the height of the original Pokémon craze, and like so many other institutions at the time, my school banned the game and its merchandise for the well-being of its students. Pokémon cards were the first to go . . . but we knew how to get around that.
My friends and I devised a system that allowed us to trade Pokémon cards at school without the adult authorities seeing. First we left our cards at home and memorized our inventories. Then at recess or during our free time in class, we compiled written lists of cards we wanted and negotiated trades. We took home each other's lists and bundled the desired cards together, wrapping them in plain white paper to attract the least attention. When we went to school the next morning, we hid the little white packages underneath our coats, met at prearranged locations on the playground (which changed every day for security), and discreetly swapped the goods before the bell rang. Sometimes, just to be safe, we even left the rendezvous in opposite directions and arrived to our class line at different times.
We were ten and eleven years old. I'm pretty sure none of us had ever seen a drug deal; I guess it was just instinct.
And I never got caught.
But now that the Pokémon are real, there's no telling what I'll do. So it's just best if I stay off the streets, you know?
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| This would probably be me. Image credit: Don't Hate the Geek |
For the rest of you who are playing Pokémon Go, have fun and be safe. You're living the dream!
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