Last Friday, our former students Ben and John came over to the house. Not only do I find it amazing that eighteen-year-olds want to hang out with a forty-one-year-old, but they were coming over to teach me and Mer how to play the video game Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. Brawl is pretty much a self-descriptive name for the game – Nintendo took many of the characters from its video game series, and made it so you could use them to have a four-player free-for-all. It is pretty entertaining to watch, but Ben and John wanted us to play it.

I made pizza for the occasion, and Ben got to the house first. He spent the fifteen minutes or so before John got there playing the game, trying to “unlock” new characters. He also tried to explain what he was doing as he was playing. We munched on some pizza, and Ben and John had some food they brought with them as well. Then, we got down to playing.

It was amusing. Ben and John let me and Mer beat on their characters in an attempt to learn the game, which worked pretty well. But every once in awhile, John could not stand it and wiped the floor with me or Mer. He did that not out of spite so much as habit. Mer turned out to be a pretty good player, better than I was. She was particularly good with the old-school video game character Donkey Kong. We had some fun mayhem for about an hour and a half, and then Ben and John had to leave. I’m not saying Mer and I could hold our own with anyone under the age of thirty, but we had a good time with it.